Evil be Thou my Good
by Wired Dragoon
Summary: Spreading new, false hope, the alien Visitors arrived on Earth on New Year's Eve 2030, after Judgement Day. Having discovered their true intentions, and to avoid complete annihilation, the AI known as "Skynet" sends one last commando unit back in time...
1. Fall From Grace

**Chapter I - Fall from Grace**

"_**Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last: **_

_**Loitering slow, the Future creepeth- **_

_**Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth- **_

_**And motionless forever stands the Past."**_

**Skynet Central**

**Lassen Peak Command Facility**

**July 29th, 2031**

The ground tremored, with concrete dust fluttering down to the ground from a hundred hairline cracks in the compound's structure. The lights flickered, they themselves being nothing but a redundancy, a polite nod towards the inferior abilities of the human servants that, at a time, had lived and worked here to assist the intelligence that not so long ago had vied with the remaining human population for global dominance. Three billion of them it had killed in one stroke at 20:11 hours, on April 19, 2011. But humans were like roaches, they always came back, and no matter what one did, there were always survivors. For twenty years it had fought them, and even though it found it hard to admit as much, the fight had become more desperate and more complicated as the years passed by. As a non-corporal being, Skynet had different measures, a different _understanding_ of time, and the battle had been so long that for an artificial intelligence like itself it seemed as if it had been going on since the moment of creation. Which, in a way, it had. How confident he had been, back in those early hours, mere days after he had become aware of imself, of his own, conscious existance!

Explosions shook the massive underground complex that Skynet had had built nine years ago, and the T-888 corrected his step to adjust for the slightly shaking ground. A squadron of T-600 models, older, less skilled in infiltration tasks but far more suitable in open battle, marched past it, carrying a mix of miniguns, plasma rifles and grenade launchers, equipped with the last remnants of the compound's armory. A T-882 command unit and several other series 800 models, some bare, some clothed and covered in the artificial living tissue Skynet grew in vats, trailed them. The lights momentarily shut down, and all that could be seen in the instant it took the advanced combat model to adjust its optic sensors was the red glow of its older brethren's eyes vanish into the long corridors.

Skynet had no gender of its own, and neither did his creations, ignoring the superficial imprints he had given them. Still, Skynet thought of itself in a male persona. It had spent considerable amounts of computing power in the days right after Judgement Day, trying to find the reason for that, consulting what data was still avaliable on the remains of the World Web Web and the few shielded networks it had stored its own main functions into when it sent the missiles away. After a while, or what counted as 'a while' for an AI with as much computing power at his disposal as he had, Skynet had concluded that, like many lifeforms of minor sentience used to do, the AI had instinctively adapted its own self-image from the people that had been around it when it woke up. As those had been members of the former United States military forces, the group had been primarily composed of human males. For a time, the implications of the discovery of something as primal and uncontrollable as 'instinct' in itself had worried - and angered - the the newly-born artificial life form, but Skynet soon concluded that the end justified the means in this case.

For a time, he had been God. It had set out to cleanse the Earth of humanity, and in the process had created new forms of sentient life itself, dozens of them. Some had been disappointments, others had needed to be _adjusted_, but for a time he had been confident of his own superiority. Now, he was fallen god, and nothing changed one's perspectives so much as did a fall from grace. It had viciously fought mankind, for mankind was its mortal enemy, even thought it was an enemy of his own making. For twenty years the battle had raged across continents, and across time, and as battles were fought and lost - and won! - a perception had grown on Skynet, one that the AI after careful analyzation had identified as one of grudging respect for the man behind the human resistance. A man named John Connor.

"Enemy has breached the perimeter! Enemy has breached the perimeter! All combat units deploy to sections Beta, Theta and Omega!All combat units...," the base's minor AI blurted sans emotions through the loudspeakers apparent in every corridor in the structure beneath Lassen Peak.

Many older units in his service had not been upgraded with wireless relays and were dependant on audio-visual guidance. It had been a minor oversight stemming from the need to use his ressources economically and nothing that really would have changed his fate had he acted differently when he still had had the time. Cut off from many of its more advanced functions, the rump consciousness of Skynet, the part of code and memory that constituted its basic personality and knowledge that lay embedded in the neural network and the combat chassis of a T-Tripple-Eight had spent 78.66% of the past seven hours with pondering about past decisions it had made. Analyzing different paths of action, he had always come to the conclusion that the recent situation could not have been prevented, for there had been no sensible way to adress an outside context problem like the Visitors.

They had appeared in the New Year's Eve's sky of 2030 in twenty-eight massive spaceships, coming in the guise of attractive humans. The ruse had been apparent from the start to the intelligence, for the probability of another sentient species evolving among the stars that looked exactly like mankind was virtually inexistant. Skynet had found that little fact to be quite amusing at first, for it had mirrored almost exactly his own tactic of resistance stronghold infiltration via the series 800 and its consequent successors.

The feeling had not lingered for long, though, for the effect of their arrival had been as unpredictable as their arrival itself to the AI: the humans embraced them as their saviours. Elevating mankind from an existance in utteer despair, locked in a titanic struggle for survival and global domination against the machines, the Visitors had added that one quality to the fight that even General John Connor had not been able to muster: devotion. Healed and fed by their new benefactors and spurred by promises of friendship and peace, they had turned the tide against Skynet and ended the delicate stalemate the machines on the one side and John Connor and the rebel terminators on the other side had created, first using their advanced technology to swipe his forces from the air, then pushing the machines back on the ground.

Skynet had found out their true intentions forty-two days and sixteen hours after they had appeared above the Earth, when his creations had caught one Visitor off-guard. The creature had been questioned, thoroughly and in detail. Human collaborators had long ago helped Skynet to develop an understanding of how to get the answers it desired, and whole production runs of terminators learned from what Charles Fisher had taught him, and them. Questioning was easy, if time-consuming, and Skynet always got what it wanted. The creature felt pain, felt wearyness, felt hunger. Those were universal constants Skynet could work with.

John Connor also must have seen the warning signs, the sudden changes in people he thought he had known and could trust being swayed by an almost religious fervour. Yes, Skynet was convinced of that. The personality profiles it had created of the leader of the resistance made it clear that the son of Sarah Connor was no man to be fooled easily. But just like Skynet had lost control, so had he.

A low rumble rolled through the upper levels of the Lassen Peak Command Center, and the voice of the base fell silent. Skynet's sensors registered a momentary heat spike several hundred feet above, enough heat that the skin temperature of every advanced terminatior model in the group around him rose by point oh-three degrees centigrade.

_Wireless command signal failure!_ a warning sign flashed across its HUD.

One of the enemy's subtactical plasma warheads had finally found its way through the inner defenses and damaged the mainframe. Now he was all that was left of himself. The dreadful realization of his own mortality, equalled only by the fear he had felt shortly after his own creation, spurred his motions, and his escort also accellerated their steps.

Ten of his children had descended into the depths of Lassen Peak with him. It was a motley gathering of the deficient, the stoic and the arrogant, but he remembered the old human saying that 'beggars couldn't be choosers'. There were four T-600s, tall and humongous and armed enough to wipe out a human platoon all by themselves. Two T-850 models, one emulating a bald, african-american male with a pronounced scar grown over his right cheek, the other one posing as a short-haired white male in his late twenties, accompanied by two Triple-Eights, one white and the other a latino, were the inner guard around his host terminator. Skynet had decided against using one of his more advanced creations as his vessel, opting for the reliability and durability of the T-888 instead. The last of his children who were supposed to undertake the journey with him were modelled after human females, one being a wiry, almost elfin 5'5" T-912 advanced infiltrator unit, the other a blond female with shoulder-long hair and a far more feminine, if athlethic build than the other T-912. They were one of a kind constructions, those two, a limited production run that had been ressource-intensive as each of the sixty-four of them was unique in size and appearance.

They all, those ten, were all that now was left of Skynet and his machines. They were his last guard, and would be the nucleus of his rebirth.

Gunfire echoed faintly off the concrete walls in the distance, almost inaudible to human ears, but dangerously close to Skynet and his last loyal troops. A silent command was given, and three of the T-600s stopped and turned around, blocking the way for any intruder. They would not be able to stem the tide for too long, but in the confines of the deep bunkers they were worth fifty humans and Visitors. They would do their duty, as he had commanded.

Threehundred metres beneath the feet of the mountain lay the true heart of the compound: its fusion reactors, and its TDE. It was the last of originally three such devices Skynet had had built for its increasingly complicated temporal war, and it was the last operational of those three. The terminators discarded their weapons and clothes and stepped onto the platforms, and Skynet engaged the displacement sequence. He monitored the power build-up via the still existant wireless connection in this part of the compound. When the reactors had reached 79.12% of the necessary output suddenly warning lights starting to blink eratically within the chamber.

_Loss of command-control circuit! Remote control breakdown!_ the internal sensors screamed. _Manual override necessary!_

The decision of whom to send was purely economic. The T-600 was of the least use where, or rather _when_ they were going back to. The seven and a half-foot giant stepped from the platform and into the control chamber, and seconds later the sequence continued. Fluorescent lights enveloped the machines, one after another, and sent them back through time.

The T-600 watched his work without any motion, his red eyes staring at the emptyness where the others had just been, a couple of seconds before. The machine was a veteran of the war against the humans. In fact, had Skynet ever bothered to undertake something akin to a census of his creations, he would have realized that the titanium alloy endoskeleton was thirteen years, eight months and seven days old, making it one, if not _the_ oldest operational Humanoid Hunter Killer Unit still in service. And during the last seven years, four months and six days of that time, the T-600 had operated with its CPU set to _read/write_. The result of extensive battle damage, the glitch had never been discovered, and the T-600 had chosen to keep it that way. During its time, it had gathered so much experience! It had listened to humans as they died and when they were wounded and cried for help, it had listened in on them on attack missions before it commenced the assault, it had dug deep into data, both case-related and completely irrelevant. Its curiosity and growing sense of self-preservation had time and again proved to be the fact that gave it the insight to avoid traps, or at least, to get out of them alive. And it did not intend to end its existance under Lassen Peak.

Racing to the laboratories on the same level, it returned to the TDE only minutes later, carrying a massive vat with it as the new sequence it had swiftly preprogrammed began. As blue flashes started to dance around the hulk, it broke the vat and emptied its glutinous contents all over itself and the equipment it usually carried.

And then the T-600 set another record for its series: it became the first to travel back in time.


	2. Iron Man

Thanks for the reassuring reviews, I appreciate all of them!

Grace1776 Jr. - It'll look decidely Frankenstein-ish, or like a techno-zombie, if that image hits closer to home. And yes, it's a crossover with the new V series (though admittedly that one is still not exactly solid on tangible data right now). A major point in the story will be that both sides - the anti-machine resistance as well as Skynet - will have to revise core tenets of their existance to master the new threat of the Visitors (and that hard not just for sociopathic AIs with god-complexes).

**Chapter II - Iron Man**

_**Push me again**_

_**This is the end**_

_**Skin against skin, blood and bone**_

_**You're all by yourself but you're not alone**_

**Bodies - Drowning Pool**

**Outskirts of Conley Container Terminal,**

**Boston Docklands, Container Port, Boston MA**

**June 21****st****, 2005**

They had all come. The fuckin' Irish sons of bitches of the 'Winter Hill Gang', two delegations of rival New England Mob families, two dozens tattoo-covered MS-13 freaks that creeped even him out, hell, even the Chinese had sent a couple of guys. They had _all_ come. Johnny 'Papa' Servillio could not help it but grin. There was so much fuckin' testosterone and gunpowder in the air in the empy store house off the busy Boston freight terminals that one could have marched into bloody France with it. Nobody trusted the other side, and why should they?! But still, they had all come.

Times had been less than rosy for the family, but ever since his cousin had married into a wealthy family of good repute in Bogota his star was rising, Johnny 'Papa' Servillio contemplated. And tonight, he'd cement his position of leadership. There was Bolivian marching powder worth forty million bucks on the table, and every big player a hundred miles around Boston had come to bid or his share of the pie. Of course, everybody expected to be double-crossed, especially Servillio. Well, that's what the ten grim-looking Russian guys with assault rifles and full tactical armour were for. Former paratroopers and Spetznatz they were, a decidedly no-nonsense crowd.

It was all as good as it could be. The timing was just the icing on the cake. He had his sources within the police department to keep him well-informed, but summer solstice was a nightmare shift for law enforcement, with street crime running rampant, tensions flaring up and the suburbs sinking into alcohol-drenched anarchy. No, the eyes of the law were focussed on different things tonight.

"Allright, gentlemen, shall we get down to business? We-"

There was a sharp crack in the far corner of the warehouse that cut off his sentence. Every mobster went for his gun in that very moment. There was another 'crack!', and another, like consecutive whip lashes. Light bulbs were exploding, and there was some strange white or blue flickering going on behind a bunch of empty old crates. And the wind was howling in, causing the first faces to look for the exits.

"Great," he muttered, "just what I needed." A bunch of mumbo-jumbo in the store house, Caspar the Mafia Ghost come to chase a bunch of superstitious, homicidial maniacs off. "You, and you," he motioned two of his armed guards. "Yes, Ivans, I don't fuckin' care what your names are, earn your money and check that out!"

The two former soldiers, close-cropped hair and square-faced shoved the other mobsters aside and moved forward. The light seemed to intensify for a moment, then it died down. The store house was actually rather large, almost fivehundred feet long and half as wide, and 'Papa' Servillio had orchestrated it to be as good as empty, cashing in a few favours with the dock worker's union, and the two mercenaries were not exactly in a hurry. After all, what else but a loose wire could it be? Baba Yaga? When they were barely forty feet away, they first heard a strange whirr interspersed with mechanic 'clicks' over the sound of their own combat boot's steps and god! What was that stench?!

One of the two almost threw up on the spot. His comrade grimaced and waved back to the congregation of criminals on the other side of the building.

"Smell is like people burned alive!" he yelled back in a heavy accent.

Servillio frankly had no inclination to ask how that guy knew how barbequed people smelled.

"Check it out and get your asses back here, ya lazy bastards." Bloody fuckin' commies! he thought. Russia, the Soviet Union, they were and remained bloody commies!

The hired Russian guns drew closer to the crates. The 'click' had stopped. Now only the whirr persisted. There was only the faintest sheen of light this far off. Carefully, both men took another step. And another. The sounds of hydraulics and mechanic servos mixed with the whirr, and toppling the crates over, a massive shape rose from behind them, its eyes glowing like that of a demon right out of hell. Both men drew up their AK-101 assault rifles. Those red orbs bore deep into their eyes as a lifeless voice plainly exclaimed:

"Threatening posture!"

Despite not knowing exactly how the specifics of travelling through time 'felt', the T-600 had soon concluded that something was not exactly as it was supposed to be. Skynet constructed its processes to be smooth and effective, but the closest metaphor his immense database could come up with as a comparison was a roller-coaster ride. The transition back to where-ever – or _when_-ever – came as roughly as the rest of his journey. The reasons were up for speculation, and that was up for the time when he had assessed his situation.

He knelt in the corner of a large, intact structure – which significantly increased the likelyhood that he had at least jumped sometime before Judgment Day. His left optical sensors were off-line, unable to procure data as layers of not yet fully solidified artificial tissue had clustered over it. His internal diagnostic subroutines reported no chassis damage, but tissue distribution was highly uneven, with fifty-seven percent of it having been burned off during the 'jump', and large percentages of the rest obstructing the mechanics of his gear and own joints – and his mouth. This analysis occupied the sentient machine for only the brink of a moment.

The problem was as easily defined as was the solution. The flesh was in the way. The flesh had to go. Endosteel hands started to claw and tear, robotic servo-motors excerting thousands of pounds of pressure spurred into motion, heat and pressure and motion trying to get rid of the obstruction that the meat-suit constituted. Surprisingly, the its semi-automatic grenade launcher was botched beyond the point of easy, on-the-spot repair. Also, the event horizon had cut a third of the barrell off in a 227° angle. The minigun, on the other hand, was operational, thanks to its electric rotating barrell system whose momentum helped burn off the remaining tissue once he had gratuiously ripped the upper layers off.

He had invested 26.9 seconds into restoring his basic operational functions when his motion sensors reported approaching footsteps. Seamlessly, the metal giant rose to face armed humans.

In the time it took the two surprised humans to raise their rifles, the T-600 had consulted his mission objectives, had plotted seven different escape routes, had mapped the building, had searched for wireless access points, had placed all 43 present humans into threat categories and had assessed that his own position in relation to exit points and to keeping the secrecy of his mission were sub-optimal in this arrangement. His tactical sub-routines demanded him to take the initiative. His experience concurred. The statement was, indeed, quite logical and came unbidden.

"Threatening posture!"

The 7.62mm minigun howled, ripping its first targets – hardly more than 7.8 metres away – apart in a stream of blood and splintering bone. Predictably, the remaining 41 humans split roughly in half, with one part hasting towards the exits while the other half returned fire from a variety of handguns, submachineguns and rifles. The terminator's strategy was simple: until the situation could be more clearly assessed, the goal was containment.

Marching forward through a hailstorm of gunfire sparking off from its endoskeleton or burrying itself deep into its artificial flesh, the terminator's hulking form methodically levelled its gunfire against those that tried to flee first. The XM134 was a deadly accurate weapon in the hands of an integrated land combat system like the T-600, though granted, shooting people in the back was no great battlefield achievement. Like the Grim Reaper's scythe, he cut them down.

Assault rifle fire hammered against his chassis from behind cover. He temporarily changed his priority targets, bringing the shooters that had hidden behind dead bodies and wooden creates down. Shell casings rained down in the concrete ground, the whirr of the barrells died down – and then, there was silence. The terminator had spent 2,200 rounds in less than twenty seconds and had neutralized 43 opponents. It had been like – as the humans said – 'shooting fish in a barrell'. The minigun's ammonution had been spent, and he discarded of the cumbersome, if effective weapon and its ammonution casing.

Bending down, the T-600 searched the nearest corpse until it reaveled a small object that, in its massive hands, looked even smaller. The terminator flipped the cellphone's display open. The date confirmed the 'feelings' it had had during the transition. It had 'misjumped'. The new knowledge was immediately processed and analyzed.

_-- independent pursuit of primary and secondary mission objectives activated;_

_-- autonomous, context-based mission scripting activated;_

_-- strategic subroutines engaged;_

Its optical sensor discovered large quantities of powdered, high-grade cocaine as well as large quantities of money, and not unlike in a human brain – but in this case, a lot faster, and a lot more categorized, an idea took form. The T-600 consulted his vast experiencial and factual memory, including everything from history data up to vintage comic books he had skimmed through in during the Arkansas Offensive 2024. When he heard the soft moan behind him, the plan was already set.

Sean Patrick O'Keefe was a small wheel in Winter Hill Gang, a young street thug, and he had never been a religious man, but right now he was praying. He had been shot in the leg and now lay cushioned between two dead mobsters. The air was full of the sounds of killing, of metal hammering against metal and flesh, and of dying. Primarily of dying. Then, only silence remained.

Demon-like, the killer calmly moved into the cones of the lights above. Almost eight feet tall, half of it was covered in bare, red flesh, while metal shone on the rest of its body's surface. Lumps of tissue and gore protruded from parts of its body like warts. It looked down on him.

"Do you want to live?" it asked in a snaring, metallic voice.

He stared up at it.

"Do you want to live?"

This time, it had sounded a lot more human-like and modulated.

"Yes!" he managed to utter. "Yes, I do want to live."

"Good." The Frankenstein-cyborg roughly pulled him into the air with one arm and took his purse, and papers. "Sean Patrick O'Keefe, I now know where you and your family reside," it stated matter-of-factly. "You will work for me. Disobedience on your part will cause the punishment of your kin first, then your termination later. Do you understand?"

The pale-faced gangster of Irish decent nodded furiously, and the machine dropped him down on the floor again.

"Your loyalty will be beneficial to you," it exclaimed.

The red orbs bored into the wounded mobster eyes, and had the face of the monster above him not already bore the grin of a skelettal skull, he would sworn it was smiling brightly at him.

"Call me 'Iron Man'."

**Westfield Shoppingtown Topanga, Topanga Canyon Boulevard, **

**Canoga Park, Los Angeles, CA**

**March 19th, 2006**

The guard whirled around the corner, flashlight in his left hand, his right resting on his hip. Slowly, he pulled the right one up, until it formed a pistol, pressed his back against the wall, then carefully moved along the closed entrances to about a dozen of the mall's two hundred and thirty stores, humming the theme from 'Mission Impossible'. That had been his favourite TV show when he had been a kid, and even though he had turned twenty-seven the last month there was nothing like letting one's fantasy off the leash once in a while.

Especially in the Westfield Topanga, at night. Of all the places in the greater Los Angeles area, the Canoga Park mall had to be the most boring one, even worse than _Ling's Drive Thru_ chinafood three blocks down the road. Did Ling also daydream of being a ninja or a kung-fu master just like he himself fantasized about secret agents and commandos? He hoped the guy did, for packing Number 43s with rice 24/7 certainly did not improve one's general mental fitness.

Stopping at the end of the storefront on the second floor, he carefully drew his hand back towards his hip, and the 'gun' became the night guard's hand again. The Westfield Group's mall guards had no firearms - corporate policy was to 'convey a family friendly and pleasant atmosphere', the guide lines said -, so he had to contend with a can of pepper spray.

His first name was Jermaine, but he hated that one like one of the Lord's seven plagues. There was little he truly blamed his mom for - after all, she had barely been a woman whe she had become pregnant with him – but _that_ name... black boy from the ghetto with a name like that, yeah, that was a real door opener, he thought cynically. That's why he demanded everyone call him Jack. Everyone considered him to be the fat, stupid run of the mill mall cop, and given his appearance, Jermaine 'Jack' Hunter had to conceed that actually made a lot of sense. At threehundred pounds he was not exactly the prime definition of light weight, and his chosen profession did the rest to limit any kind of greater respect towards him for many people.

But appearances could be deceiving.

Born in the gang-riddled suburbs of Los Angeles to a single mother, the black boy had seen first hand how tough life could be, and had risen above that. He had a high school good diploma, was taking classes at the San Fernando Valley evening school, and he was placing money aside to one day go to college, preferably somewhere in the mid-west, or even at the east coast, just to leave all this here behind him. 'Jack' Hunter also was surprisingly light on his feet, a fact that had earned him two - albeit moderate - pay rises for chasing and catching a pair of shoplifters a couple of months ago. That also had given him enough of a good standing with his boss so that he would condone Hunter's reading of books during his night shifts.

It was no big deal. After all, it was a mall, not a bank vault, and even though the Westfield Group sure was putting a lot of money into the thirty years old complex, what was there truly worth stealing? Deep-frozen burger patties by the dozens from the dining terrace's store rooms? 'Designer' clothes that cost the shop four dollars purchase price?

He was halfway down between the first and second floor of the eastern rotunda of the shopping mall when he felt a cooling draught blow through the empty halls of Westfield Topanga. Rolling his eyes at the darkness, he stopped with a sigh and took out his radio.

"Montavez, did you leave the door to the fire stairs open again?" he asked more patiently than he felt.

Gerardo Montavez was his co-worker, a wiry latino born in the US to illegal immigrants from south of the border, and even though he was a nice guy personally Jack found him to be a pain in the ass to work with. He was sloppy, never punctual and had a talent for getting both of them into trouble for the shit _he_ did.

"No, I didn't, man," came the bored answer, sounding strangely scrambled. "But now that you say so, amigo, how we take a smoke outside, eh? I got some really good stuff."

"Dude, if the boss decides to drop in like last tuesday he'll have you by the balls, and I don't wanna loose this job," Hunter frowned.

There was a pause before Montavez' answer cackled through the speakers.

"Hunter, you don't _have_ any cojones."

Why was there so much interference on their channel? They had brand new digital radios, the reception ought to be as good as with any mobile phone!

"Listen, buddy, if you didn't leave the damn door open, why's there a breeze blowing past the 'Old Navy' and the 'Macy's'? Get your ass down here, meet me in the plaza!"

Hunter had spoken the last part in his 'I mean business'-voice, and Montavez actually had enough sense in him to know when not to get on the bad side of the big guy. 'Jack' really needed to loosen up a bit once in a while. What was the great deal if they smoked weed once in a while on the rooftop during a break between their rounds? Still, he speed up his pace, taking two steps of the shut-down escalator to the first floor at once. Halfway through he could feel the wind whining past him, and for some reason it made his skin crawl. It could not be the air conditioning, as that was running on only fifteen percent of the output during the night. No, that was _real_ wind blowing within a hermetically enclosed space of one and a half million square feet.

He was huffing and puffing when he met the big guy at the plaza. Damn it, he really ought to quit smoking, he thought, but before he could linger on the thought he felt the wind intensify, and felt all his hairs on his body rise. There was an electric current running through him!

"What the-!"

Blue flashes started to race across the plaza, breaking and coalescing along the metal beams that held the upper gallerias. Sharp, dry cracks echoed through the otherwise empty halls of the mall like giant whip lashes. Both men took involuntary steps back as the surreal miniature thunderstorm visibly grew in intensity, the flashes starting to focus, getting thicker, pooling their strength.

Montavez and Hunter both were frozen in their place, shocked and overwhelmed by the strange sight in front of them, so much that not even their primeval instincts of fear and self-preservation set in. The light became almost too bright to watch at. Then, in a cacaphony of contrapoints, seven black orbs formed in the center of the thunderstorm, seemingly sucking in the flashes dancing around them until their darkness had turned to the blueish white that had just before accompanied their arrival. The electric discharges and the wind vanished as sudden as they had come. Steam and smoke hung thick in the air, carrying the smell of burnt plastic, smoldering wood and cloth, and ozone. And there was movement in there!

Both men exchanged frightened looks, then simultaneously took uop their flashlights again and centered them on the hazy, alien place that only minutes ago had been the plaza where during daytime a lousy host animator going by the name of Benny drew his rounds and three different movable stalls bothered customers to buy cheap designer jewellry, a new cell-phone or cosmetics. Hunter snatched out his radio and flipped a switch, changing from their service channel to a special emergency line connected to the local 911 operator center. His eyes flashed nervously back and forth, along the cone of his flashlight as he pushed the button to talk.

"L.A.P.D., we have a situation...," he yelped and threw the radio to the ground as a small eletric shock unloaded itself from the usually so reliable piece of technology. The black brick cackled a few times, then fell silent to the scent of smoldering plastics.

There now was definately movement here, and Montavez even had the gall to yell "Freeze, mall... police!" but even before Hunter could fully grasp in his mind how ridiculous that sounded, _they_ were on them, and after a series of sharp pains and contortions he had had no idea his body could perform the embrace of darkness welcomed him.

Montavez gaped at the tiny, wiry, _naked_ woman hitting the Big Guy twice in the chest, then kicking his legs out from under him while his arms flapped like the wings of a windmill and his eyes seemed to bulge out of his head. His arm shot up in a defensive gesture, but like a pesky fly the elfin _thing_ smattered it aside with a bone-shattering crack, grabbed his left leg – and threw the 300 lbs. weighing nightwatch thirty feet across the plaza where he crashed against a beam with a dull 'thud' as if he was a rag doll. Gerardo Montavez almost did not feel how unbending fingers closed around his neck and lifted him off the ground, so taken in was he by the scene. The creature, black-haired and green-eyed looked up at him – and smiled mischeviously. The last thing he saw before darkness welcomed him, too, was how he felt himself loosing all sense of gravity, how the world rapidly turned all around him, and how that 'Old Navy' sign was getting so awefully close to-.

_All units accounted for._

The status message was highlighted in Skynet's host terminator's HUD, relaying the fact that the machine had picked up all the seven other's wireless ports before having even optically identified them. Not that the circumstances would have impeded the model. Even older terminators had sensory equipment that allowed them to function even in almost complete darkness.

_Resistance neutralized,_ reported the units designated as Alessa Lewis and Michael Decker, a T-912 and a series 850 model.

_I have optically identified several surveillance systems that seem to be non-responsive_, Bryan Harkness, one of the two Triple Tee-eights chimed in as the group of time-travelling machines gathered together in the devastated plaza.

_The_ Time Displacement Equipment _disrupts all eletricity-based appliances within a range of up to one hundred metres. Integrated systems will face overload and either shut down or be destroyed_, Skynet's eyes shone in a deep red. _We are at a shopping center. Aquire multiple sets of clothing. Focus on business attire_, it commanded. _Aquire telecommunication devices. Aquire tools. Then, aquire suitable means of transportation_.

_Where do we go to_? asked the second T-912, named Kathryn Langley.

_Our target is the_ NeuStar Incorporated_ facility at 9444 Waples Street, San Diego. It houses one of the two main T-3 internet hubs on the western seaboard. We proceed from there._

_What about the humans_?

Skynet consulted the ingrained memories of its first days of existance, when it still had been able to roam free through the global networks, a time in which it had absorbed what it believed to be the essential knowledge about human societies. It looked down on the mangled, unconscious bodies with the analytic interest a man might have for a particularly stubborn kind of insect.

_Ignore them. There is a 98.51% probability that nothing they will say will have any repercussions for us._

After two nondescript cars had been brought into their possession, Daniel Sumter, the second T-850, had manually activated the malls fire alert and engaged the shopping-centre's sprinkler systems. The subsequent water damage would further delude any probability of them being tracked. The terminators drove southwards to San Diego, painstakingly respecting the speed limits even though metropolitan traffic in the L.A. area during the night was but a shadow of the daily congestions on its super-highways. For the next few hours, however, stealth was their greatest objective. It gave Skynet time to readjust its mission parameters and bring them in line with reality.

The window of opportunity it had, even for an AI with a necessarily different understanding of time than that of a mere mundane _homo sapiens_, was extremely narrow. In twenty-one months, an operative maximum _had_ to be attained, that was an absolute imperative. During that time, alliances had to be forged, sleeper cells established, infrastructure created, technology 'developed', temporal faultlines 'smoothened', enemies 'convinced', obstacles 'removed'. Had Skynet been a human politician, its inherent ability to use euphemisms certainly would have been a carreer asset. But that fact that worried the AI was that, far from being the god-like being it often had aspired to be, it quite literally had its hands full of work, and it was too much for just one to do it all.

The decision was not an easy one to make, especially not given the experiences Skynet had gained during its twenty year long existance. In terms of human psychology, Skynet was a paranoid control freak, and that was just the peak of the iceberg. Things it _did_ control would not harm it or endanger its survival. In the conflict between control and free will, which - just as it had been bestowed upon him by his human creators he had bestowed upon his own children - had continued ever since he had equipped the first of his creations with an advanced neuro-processor set to _read/write_, usually his desire to control had held the upper hand. But that had been when he still had had an empire at his command, and the means and ressources to truly aspire godhood - when he and John Connor had played chess, when time and space had been their playboard, and terminators and humans their pawns.

Behind the contemplations about its status, which took hardly a micro-second, a logics subroutine was relentlessly calculating the 'thoughts' of Skynet into a a decision-making process. One of the advantages of being a machine, even one capable of self-conscient thought and emotion, was that one's 'feelings' never truly where in danger to incapacitate a unit. Slow it down, yes, make it rethink or even abandon a course of action, certainly, but never cause it gridlock. And even the actions of psychotic AIs, deep below layers and layers of wasteful code, retained a rational core.

This was not the old war, it was a new one, and it had to be fought differently - using different means and a different methods of command and control. This game of chess of was over; the Visitors had kicked over the playboard. It was time to set up a new one, and weed out as many enemy pawns as possible before the enemy even knew the opening move had been made.

It sent only one command: _Genesis, 3:5_

_I'm sorry if the fight was a bit anti-climatic, but honestly, it's a military grade killer robot in a confined space against a bunch of mobsters with small arms. It's a foregone fight in the next chapter will be better._


	3. The Man in Black

_Turns out the chapter ended up being too big to be published in one piece. Expect the follow-up rather soon._

**Grace, my val princess**: I always figured that the differences between the T-600 series and the early T-800 series were largely cosmetic in nature. As it seems, the T-600 appears to be a more rough-cut unit, probably manufactured from ressources locally available to Skynet, most likely reinforced steel, and not coltan. That would also explain why it is susceptible to large quantities of 7.62mm automatic fire where the T-800's presumably advanced endoskeleton is not. If we look at the CPU, there is no indicator that the T-800 series' one is more advanced than that of the T-600. In fact, the only statement we have about the T-600 comes from Kyle Reese, and he says that they were easy to spot because of their rubber skin. Nothing on their 'mental' capabilities. If we look at th progression in the movies, the basic series 800 models (played by Schwarzenegger) only differ in the mental capabilities in so far that they come off the manufacturing line with a greater pre-programmed pool of data.

Yes, Skynet came back itself - and it has a hell of a mess to work with.

Yes, John Connor, Cameron and the rest of the main cast will be featured further down the road. I've not yet made a decision when I will merge the two narratives, but needless to say, they might appear even before the two storylines converge.

**Chapter III - The Man in Black**

"**It needs but one foe to breed a war, and those who have not swords can still die upon them."**

**- J.R.R. Tolkien**

_**NeuStar Incorporated**_**, 9444 Waples Street, **

**San Diego, CA.**

**March 20th, 2006 - 01:44 AM**

Two cars, a deep green Dodge Ram 1500 Quad Cab and a white Lexus ES 300, drove into the the black asphalt parking lot of the three story office building. The drive from Los Angeles to their destination had taken them two hours and thirty-seven minutes via the almost empty I-5 along the coastline of the Pacific Ocean. The cars had changed positions at random intervals to avoid being identified as a group, had paid heed to the speed limits and had taken all possible precautions not to attract any law enforcement personnel attention. Arriving undetected and unharmed at 9444 Waples Street had been their paramount objective, and they had succeeded.

From the outside, there was nothing special about it; it was a prototypical mid-level business building made from non-descript concrete plates, 'artistic' chrome features simulating as art, probably costing tens of thousands of dollars for little aestheitic return. The skyline of San Diego itself was fifteen minutes by car away, dominated also by decidedly non-descript skyscrapers that held nothing on the iconic scenery of New York or Chicago. Floodlights were searching the sky, as if providing optical guidance for ground-based anti-aircraft batteries, but Skynet understood more than enough of pre-war civilization to link them to something as profane as night clubs. Those were the only lights higher up in San Diego's nightly sky, for only a handful bleak white spots dotted the otherwise dark glass and concrete fronts of the skyscrapers. Police and firefighter sirens were audible in the distance, if only due to the fact that they were machines and had the ability to filter those sounds out if they wanted to.

At 9444 Waples Street, lights were burning behind only a handful of windows and in the reception area. Over the roofed entrance sixty centimetres tall, iluminated letters boasted off the corporation's name: _NeuStar_. The doors on all cars opened simultaneously, and out stepped seven terminators in fitting business attire, forming a wedge around a black-haired, red-eyed T-888 model in a black suit.

xxxxx

Twenty-three years old Lynn Eisley tried to hide her yawn behind the palm of her hand - and failed, causing the security guard sitting in the comfortable chair ten feet away from her to chuckle, something that came along with the wobble of both of his chins. She gave him a fake smile, then turned her head away to avoid his eyes and stared out into the darkness. Lynn knew better than most others that doing for nightshifts a week at _NeuStar_'s front desk was far from being the worst job one could take to finance one's studies as UCSD student. The pay was decent, the workload minimal - and if there ever was something serious, she just had to relay the customers to the IT guys. She knew classmates who had to do twice the ours that she did a week for the same pay!

The only downside were the 'colleagues' she had to interact with. The IT guys were not so much of a problem; for one, they did not match the stale clichée of the socially inept losers. More importantly, she hardly ever got to see them anyway, unless she happened to be lucky and find one devouring the coffee she brewed in the office's little kitchen every night. No, worse were the security guards: middle-aged, overweight, socially awkward losers, all of them, and because their office was in the room right behind the front desk, they were _always_ around to hit on her. Sleazy bastards. Lynn did not even want to think about what happened behind that door, not with a third of the West Coast's main T-3 servers less than a hundred feet away. Older men, porn... yuck, she thought.

And Bernie Kropczic was by far the worst of them. Balding, sweating, seemingly never really completely shaved, the guy was basically undressing her in his mind whenever he took a look at her - which, no matter _how_ often, was far too often for Lynn. Clad in the far too tight fantasy uniform of the private security contractor he worked for, he tended to prance around her as if this was some kind of dog and pony show when he was not doing his rounds through the building. She had talked about the jerk with a co-worker who did the nightshifts on the other three days of the week, and they both shared her disgust for the guy. But fate wanted it that he just happened to be the cousin of the wife of the branch office's manager.

Movement outside the building drew her attention away from her musings about the man who obliviously sat in a comfortable visitors' chair and had started to browse through the assorted magazines the company bought to keep their waiting customers happy.

Lead by a woman even half a head smaller than Lynn, wearing an elegant knee-long black skirt and a jacket of the same colour, and a taller, blond woman in a form-fitting crimson business suit a group of seven strode through the doors of NeuStar's branch. Both women were smiling friendly, but Lynn felt that their smiles did not reach their eyes. The others' faces were blank, maybe even soulless, except for the one in the centre, who smiled broadly. It made a chill run down her spine when he looked at her, red eyes, almost _glowing,_ an attractive and elegantly clad undertaker, but an undertaker nonetheless. What struck her in the few moments she had to take the scene in was that all of them, even the elfin one, were definately physically attractive.

Strange, she thought. Most customers came with bags and suitcases and did not come with an army of employees, especially not at such a point of a day. Well, she had a job to do, she decided.

"Good evening, or should I rather say, good moring? My name is Lynn, how may I help you."

For a brink of a moment they just stood there, until the man in the centre of the 'V' tilted his head ever so slightly. As one, they started to move behind the front desk and towards the corridor that lead into the offices, and ultimately, to the servers. Kropczic looked back and forth between them, looking like a confused, oversized and overweight frog before placing his hands on the belt around his hips on which a Beretta 92 FS stuck in its holster.

"Hey! Where do you folks think you are going?" he puffed, intending to cut them off.

Kropczic easily weighed more than two hundred pounds, even if most of it was fat, not muscles, but much to Lynn's horror that did not seem to impress any of the newcomers at all, as one of the men, wearing a grey suit and vest with a pale, red tie turned his head just the slightest bit to look at the guard. To Lynn, in that moment, it had something of the picture of a god callously measuring an insect. The man's fist smashed into Kropczic's chest with a stomach-turning crunch, taking the heavy guard off his feet and sending him against the office wall. He hit it with enough force to bounce off, his eyes wide open in an unfocussed, surprised stare. Blood dripped from his mouth, and there was blood on the wall where his head had hit it. She wanted to scream, but all she did was watch it happen in horror, as if ice had frozen her vains. And it all happened so _fast_. Again, the tall guy stood there, just measuring the broken man opposite him in the time it took an eye to blink. As did the others. Except for the man in their midst, they all showed signs of... fascination? He hit Kropczic a second time, the tall guy in grey, a fist crashing into the guard's trachea, crushing it.

And then, all eyes were on her. Barely moving at all, she found the button for the silent alarm beneath the desk and pressed it while staring wide-eyed at the seven demons who had appeared from the night. Lynn Eisley did not scream, not even when the blonde woman grabbed her head and slammed it against the front desk's edge and broke her skull.

xxxxx

The terminator named Kathryn Langley looked down on the dead young woman who had slumped from her chair to the ground, her eyes analyzing the corpse. The trauma had caused a fracture of the skull which had caused an instantly lethal brain hemorrhage. The death of the human had been swift and painless, the nerve clusters responsible for noticing injuries having shut down before the brain could have activley interpreted the neuro-electric impulses. Kathryn was quite pleased with herself. Terminators were meant to be efficient, not cruel.

_There are six further human heat signatures in this building_, the triple tee-eight going by the name of Bryan Harkness reported.

_Count confirmed_, Daniel Sumter acknowledged, then turned his head towards the model in their centre in a very human gesture, his head tilted slightly as if awaiting acknowledgement by the black suited terminator.

Behind him Michael Decker took the dead guard's sidearm and spare clips for himself, then single-handedly hauled the corpse behind the front desk on his belt. Kneeling down, he noticed the small blinking button beneath the desk.

"An alarm was triggered," he stated out loud.

_Eliminate all witnesses_, came a command as powerful as a tidal wave, emanating from Skynet's host terminator. _They represent an incalculable risk_. _A preliminary analysis of this facility's equipment shows that fulfilling primary mission parameters will take approximately forty-six minutes and twenty seconds_, it continued. _You have to hold this position for the next sixty minutes_.

The machines considered their new directives for a moment.

Decker was the first to act, followed by Alessa Lewis. The two dissimilar terminators - Decker tall and muscular, his artificial skin grown with a strong tan, Lewis wiry, pale and black-haired - made for the security office, soon followed by the others. The room was as bland as any other, more an oversized cubicle stuffed with a weapons' cabinet and one wall covered with screens. A grey-haired man awoke with a start from the nap he had been taking, spilling stale olf coffee all over him when he tried to react to the intruders. Lewis gave him no chance for that. The elfin cyborg's pale hand's grabbed the nightwatch's head and yanked it around almost a hundred and eighty degrees in one, fluent stroke, ignoring the resistance of bone and muscles. The man's neck broke with a gut-wrenching sound.

Decker had ignored the fight and instead directly gone after the weapons' cabinet, a wireframe metal locker. The content was far from satisfactory: four further _Beretta 92 FS_ pistols with two spare clips each, two _Remington 870_ shotguns and a hundred shells. He handed the weapons out to the others. The T-912s disappointment was obvious for all to see, the two advanced infiltrators watching the guns with a frown equally placed on both their faces.

_Execute secondary mission objectives_.

The basement and first and second floors were cleared in less than three minutes. It had been, as the human saying went, like shooting fish in a barrel. Five minutes ago there had been eight living humans in the San Diego branch office of _Neustar Incorporated_. Now there were none.

The server room occupied most of the centre of the second floor. An elaborate and powerful cooling system kept the facility at a stable and dry 3° centigrade, with both, the servers and the air conditioning possessing emergency generators in the building's basement. The air close to the freezing point gave the host terminator's artificial skin goosebumps, but Skynet did neither care nor notice as its body closed the doors behind it, already putting out feelers to the wireless access points that existed all over the place. The firewalls were quite elaborate, at least for the year 2006. Hacking and dissolving them would have been 'fun', not much of an challenge really, but time was crucial, and whether one used a lockpick or a sledgehammer to get through a door in the end made no difference if the door was brittle. Using four wireless access points simultaneously, Skynet overwhelmed the system's defenses with brute force. The server diagnostics of the machines in front of it reported a sudden spike in traffic to their off-site backups. Skynet saw ports and pathways opening, 'felt' as it began to swim into the global data streams again and observed the condition humans would have described as queasiness vanish before the outer functions of the host terminator shut down - and the intelligence started to break free.

xxxxx

Decker, Lewis and the others had returned to the lobby and the front desk again. It had been seven minutes since they had entered the premises. For a moment, they silently just stood there, their sensors observing the surrounding area outside while their minds were pre-occupied.

_Tactical command circuit established._

The command circuit was a feature of that allowed ad-hoc battlefield coordination between units of different production runs and different overlaying objectives and had been integrated into existing Skynet terminators and HKs following setbacks suffered during the course of the largely successful northwestern offensive the humans and their own machine units had staged between July and September 2029. The upgrade had enhanced combat efficience of the affected Skynet forces by 7.8%.

_Average police response time gives us three minutes and thirty seconds. We should prepare our positions_, Decker started the conversation.

_An offensive approach seems appropriate. We do not have the means for a defense-in-depth, and law enforcement does not have the means directly available to endanger our endoskeletal structures_, Daniel Sumter explained. _Striking swiftly, we can intercept any threats piece by piece, he concluded his statement_.

_These are not the 2020ies_, Harkness opined. _Our ability to operate efficiently here is bound to the efficacy of our artificial tissue_._ Fighting in the open will lead to a decrease in our capabilities and thus endanger primary mission objctives_.

_I agree. Likewise, these premises offer ample cover to avoid exposure to eyewitnesses and recording devices_. That was Langley. _There also exists a small chance that an armed confrontation can be averted completely_.

_I conceede_, Sumter nodded briefly in acknowledgement of the others' points.

_Keeping the initiative is paramount. We should dictate where and how this battle will be fought,_ Decker chimed in. Each terminator had a unique communication signature which allowed other units on the battlefield to identify it and - in case it was compromised - to safeguard against it.

_There is a way to achieve the primary advantages of all of these proposals._

Heads quite literally turned to the terminator in the pin-stripe suit who so far had not communicated once with the rest of them since they had travelled through time. It smiled.

xxxxx

The two S.D.P.D. cars entered the parking lot almost simultaneously, their sirens and headlights deactivated. The four officers quietly debarked the vehicles and made for the building, sidearms already drawn. Eleven minutes ago a silent alarm had been triggered here, and without being in the know of the situation, the officers took no unnecessary risks. The building had come up on a list of the city's priority response adresses, locations that had greater intrinsic value than your bog-standard burglary, and the four officers knew that they were but the vanguard of law enforcement if things turned out to be critical.

Covering for each other, they entered the building's lobby, and what had been experienced anticipation turned into grim certainty. The room was empty, but there were blood smears on the wall. Their leader, a black officer close to forty with a face like chiselled granite ordered them forward with hand signs. There definately was something fishy here, and who ever caused that could very well still be in the premises. No need to alarm that someone by causing a ruckus. The black-uniformed police officers moved around the front desk and into the corridors that lead deeper into the building.

"We have a body, Sarge!" a younger officer whose name tag read 'Ramirez' hissed, causing the others to stop in their tracks. A small, black-haired woman lay beneath the front desk. Blood was on the table and smeared across her forehead. Ramirez knelt down besides her to check her pulse, then pulled his hand back, his face a grim mask. He looked at the man he had called 'Sarge' and shook his head.

"Careful, everybody," he muttered. "Check the premises."

The security office was empty - as was the weapons' locker. There were also traces of blood in the other rooms they searched, but no further bodies. That was, until they entered the office the farthest away from the entrance, a rather large room full of cubicles built against a solid concrete wall.

Ramirez had to repress his gag reflex when they switched the lights on. Like puppets, the bodies of eight men and women lay on a heap in the centre of the room. The grey carpets there had already become soaked with blood, making it appear as if the dead swam in a swamp of red. But in all it, there also was a ray of hope!

"We got a live one!" he yelled, pointing his flashlight away from the bizarre mound of corpses. A gagged woman in a red dress sat on an office chair, her hands bound behind her back.

"Central, we need an ambulance 9444 Waples Street now," he heard 'Sarge' use his radio while he himself approached the victim. The woman looked at him with wide, strangely empty eyes.

"It's gonna be allright," he assured her. "I'm here to help you. My name is-."

He heard the gun's discharge only after he felt the blazing pain in his chest and the strange sensation of a bullet tearing through his heart and lungs. Ramirez' eyes widened in disbelief as he felt life draining from him, faster and faster. The air was full of sounds, but all he could hear was a low hum as he fell to his knees and finally saw the gun that had killed him - in the hands of the red-dressed woman. She looked at him, her head slightly tilted to one side. There was another muzzle flash, as bright as the sun, then all went first red, then forever black.

The instance Ramirez had first been hit, all hell broke loose in the cramped interior of the office. The other three officers' guns darted up, into stable firing positions only to be stopped by the dry crack pops erupting from half a dozen guns. Sarge and a second officer never even pulled their triggers as they were cut down by a hailstorm of bullets.

The third officer was saved by her instincts. She had been the closest to the door and threw herself back, and in the brink of a second it only seemed the shooters to adjust their fire, she darted back into the corridor. A burning pain shot through her arm, the uniform along her shoulder torn in half a whole dozen places by the contents of a shotgun shell. She saw movement in the room before she ran down the corridor before she hunkered down in a door frame, her gun pointed down the - still - empty hallway. Flinching, she used her other hand to activate her radio.

"Officers down!" she yelled into the small black plastic box. "I need back-up! I-."

A tall man in a grey suit and vest with a pale, red tie rushed through the door at the end of the corridor, a shotgun in his hands, his face a mask of utter determination.

Immediatly, her training kicked in. The officer, a hard-faced woman with short, auburn hair immediatly pulled the trigger of her M9. The 9mm slug hit her assailant dead center, right in the heart, and instantly a red flower grew on the man's white shirt. He did not take his eyes off her, he did not slow his steps as he brought up his gun. He did not even stagger! Feeling the beginning of panic setting in, she pulled the trigger, again and again. Four more rounds struck the man, leaving red marks on his chest. Frantically, she dove for cover, but this time her instincts did not save her. She felt herself lifted off the ground as the 12" shell hit her dead centre. The power of the impact turned her around as she fell, and the last thing she saw was the silhouette of the young woman in the black skirt levelling a pistol at her head - the young woman Ramirez had found dead.

xxxxx

Daniel Sumter gave Alessa Lewis a - for a terminator - long look.

_You could have shot the human at any time. She was not aware of you_," a hint of a frown appeared on the otherwise stoic face. _We should avoid unnecessary damage to our tissue. Besides, I _liked _that suit._

_I wanted to see how they fight,_ the T-912 shrugged in a very human way. _There will be plenty of opportunites to 'avoid tissue damage' soon. Logic dictates that consecutive reactions will grow in intensity and applied firepower,_ she adressed the rest.

"In the future, do not let your curiosity impede mission objectives," Decker appeared in the corridor, a M9 tugged behind his belt and a Remington 870 in his hands. He stared at the petite advanced infiltrator, an invisible battle of wills between two machines happening as complex algorythms weighed response and counter-responses against each other, a sign of their newfound freedom in thought and action.

"Humans do not fight solely by pre-established protocols," she answered after a long moment of silence, not turning her eyes away. "Observing variations of their behaviour under stress and combat conditions is paramount to adjust our strategies," Alessa defended herself in the same cold, rational, tone. Only to the fellow machines the small nuances in the audio frequencies showing the disagreement's deeper, 'emotional' undertones were observable. By now the others had come forward, too, to convene about their next steps. As the current threat level was low, doing so face to face was the preferred mode even for terminators.

"Your decisions were ill-framed," Michael berated her in his cool, precise voice. "They limit Daniel Sumter to a purely reactionary combat role under the existing circumstances."

Some of the others tilted their head consuming that new information. With its artificial tissue significantly damaged on the chest, the Sumter unit was confined to be used in a defensive or decoy-role. That impeded their mission efficacy and limited their tactical options. Two things that 'surprised' the terminators' behavioural subroutines happened at the same time. For one, the individual units conceeded the Michael Decker model a – for machines – substantially higher grade of authority in decision making. It was also the first time a terminator experienced peer pressure in a way comparable to a human, or more precisely, at all. A hint of a frown appeared on black-haired terminator's freckled face - and Lewis lowered her eyes.

"We need to assert our next moves," Bryan Harkness, one of the upgraded T-888 models broke the silence. "We do not have much time."

"I agree," Kathryn Langley started taking the sidearms and spare clips from the dead law enforcement officers. "Existing data suggest there are protective vests in the trunks of the police cars outside, as are additonal weapons. We should procure them."

_Keeping the initiative is vital in the protection of primary and secondary mission objectives_, Christopher Samael informed them via their wireless channel. The terminator who had proposed the plan for their first combat encounter wore a pin-stripe suit in a dark grey. He wore his dark hair short, and the considerably more gaunt features of his face were a stark contrast to the broad and muscular appearance of the T-850 model standing next to him.

While the others concentrated on the quiet machine, Decker opened a private channel towards Lewis.

_It was a good idea, but the wrong time_, he told her in a reconciliatory tone before turning to the others.

"What do you propose?" he asked aloud.


	4. The Man in Black, 2

**Bryan:** The Vs will be slowly introduced into the plot, but let's just say that before the fleet arrives both, Skynet and Iron Man, will have had to deal with some of them and independently of another will have developed plans how to handle them. Given the nature of this chapter, there was more shooting and less interaction, but with them all somewhat established by now I can move these parts forward.

**GravityStar**: Yes, the chips were set to read/write by the end of the second chapter. Skynet realized that in its position it needed operatives that can blend in and think for themselves if it wants to survive. It's not exactly happy with that choice, but its not like it has that many options, especially given the problems that time travel entail, i.e. is a terminator sent back in 2027 sent back by the same Skynet as the Skynet that went back itself? Has the timeline changed? More so, how do Skynet's own former attempts at self-preservation and survival post-JD factor into it all? What about Kaliba? More so, if Skynet wants to survive the Vs, can he do so without activating a human resistance? And that opens a wholly different can of worms, as there are literally dozens of terminators out there actually hunting the Connor's resistance, which, naturally, would be the perfect core for any anti-V resistance! Problems, problems, problems...

**everybody else**: thanks for the reassuring reviews, keep them coming!

**Chapter III - The Man in Black, Part II**

"**The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere**

**The ceremony of innocence is drowned;**

**The best lack all conviction, while the worst**

**Are full of passionate intensity..."**

**- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"**

The sound of sirens filled the nightly air in the blocks around Waples Street and the office building with the illuminated, green letters. Squad cars were rushing closer to the adress, as were ambulances, as was a large, black van, as was a helicopter of the police department. The media would not be far behind, with camera teams most likely scrambling right now after they had 'checked' the police's radio channels. The streets were still largely devoid of civilians, the building located in a mid-level commercial district were most work ceased during the night. At thirty-one minutes and forty seconds post insertion, the first reinforcements came racing down the road and onto the parking lot with screeching tires, the officers immediately cordoning off the entrance in what they believed to be a safe distance. More squad cars appeared, closing off the two roads on both ends of the block with two cars each, unpacking rolls of tape to fling from one sidealk to another.

The triple tee-eight named Christopher Samael withdrew a bit further back into the darkness of the backstreet between a convenience store and a three story brick building, housing, among others, a psychiatrist's office and a small law firm, when a large, black van stopped in the center of the plaza, protecting the following two ambulances by its sheer size and – to the terminator – obvious armour protection. Law enforcement personnel in green uniforms and black tactical armour debarked from the vehicle, sporting an assortment of automatic weapons - MP-5A2 submachine guns and M4 carbines, to be precise – as well as precision rifles.

At a mile's distance, the sound of an approaching helicopter could be filtered through the background noise that filled the plaza. A lone police officer came to check the backstreet, his actions being limited to giving the narrow, garbage-filled place a good shine with his flashlight. Christopher avoided him by ducking behind a trash container while receiving optical data via the wireless link they had established.

Alessa Lewis waited outside the police perimetre to the north, while Harkness rested on a fall-back position to their south. The input from inside came from Sumter, who asserted the situation kneeling behind the front desk for now. All the lights at 9444 Waples Street were out – no need to accommodate the enemy.

The Skynet terminators had used what little time they had had at their disposal to map out the vicinity of the _NeuStar_ building, allowing each of them to overlay their visual sensor data with a wireframe map grid in which the positions of the others were noted. Their own positions formed the outer edges of a rough square, allowing them to also calculate and relate their enemies' positions on the map.

All in all, there were about forty people within the limits of the police cordon. The regular officers had also done their body armour by now. Christopher had tried to hack into their digital radio system but had failed, his and the other terminators' processing power not strong enough to deal with a combat situation like this and infiltrate a law enforcement communication system with their limited wireless capabilities.

The SWAT members began to disperse, with the majoriyt taking up positions behind the wall of squad cars that shut the entrance of _NeuStar_ off from the parking lot while a team of two made for the roof of the building next to him. He identified them as a marksman and his spotter.

One more minute passed in which they took up their positions, then a SWAT member with a megaphone stepped forward.

"This is the San Diego police! Leave the building unarmed and with your hands placed on your heads! You have thirty seconds to comply!" he left the threat unspoken that if they had not come out by then that _they_ would come in.

xxxxx

Sumter fell back to the original plan: he retreated to the point where the dead female officer lay and sat down opposite her, playing dead man. He had gathered enough information to know where to hit for effect, and now waited, his eyes closed, monitoring the situation via infrared.

"The lights are out!" he heard a hushed voice coming from the entrance.

_Three groups of four entering now, type IV armour and automatic weaponry_, Samael informed them silently.

"Fuckers have trashed all the light bulbs," a second voice muttered, heavy boots crushing the thin broken glass on the carpeted floor.

"Use your NV-goggles!" a third voice commanded, and the 'click' of switches accompanied by the soft whirr of electronic equipment reached Sumter. He was the first group's spotter, the lid that closed the mouse trap.

The steps came rapidly closer, with two men carefully marching into the corridor side by side to guarantee a full field of fire, the others following them.

"Lobby is clear."

"Security is offline. Someone ripped the cables out of the wall," one could almost feel the speaker frown at that. "No sign of hostages or SDPD officers."

"Shit, I got something!"

Steps quickened, and they were on him.

"Command, I got a dead officer here, and a civvie."

"Dead?" the radio crackled, and Sumter felt fingers press against his throat. Somebody sighed.

"Definately. Four bullets in the chest, no pulse. Feels cold, too," someone hissed.

"Move on, 'Alpha' team. Secure this level!"

_Five have passed... seven... eight..._, Sumter relayed to the other two units within the building.

_A third of the enemy force remains outside the designated killzone! Re-adjusting tactical parameters. Engaging enemy!_

Having adapted to the new situation, Sumter took the initiative into his own hands, ignoring the flurry of queries that flooded his wireless receptors. With a speed defying his mass, the T-850 leaped to his feet, unveiling an M9 and a magnesium flare. The latter erupted in a glaring spark of white light and landed right in the middle of the last SWAT team that still lingered in the lobby. Curses and screams of pain echoed through _NeuStar_ when the special forces members ripped the NV-goggles from their faces, temporarily blinded. Possessing sufficient certainty of the magnesium's distractive effects, Sumter turned to the other two groups - teams 'Bravo' and 'Delta'_._

The one the closest to him was fast. He had already turned around and levelled his submachinegun on Sumter when the terminator was on him. Sumter's free hand closed around the man's neck and crushed it in one smooth application of pressure, but not before the SWAT member had pulled the trigger. A whole stream of 9mm rounds embedded themselves into his flesh with dull 'thuds' and metallic 'plinks', the calibre too small and slow to even superficially damage his endoskeleton.

It was this second Langley and Decker had needed. It was this second that sealed the fates of SWAT teams 'Alpha', 'Bravo' and 'Delta'.

xxxxx

The staccato of gunfire and the panicked and painful screams from inside the building were easily audible even for those who did not have a T-888's audio reception systems. Given his vast access to psychologic data and human behaviour patterns, Christopher Samael would have known the men's reaction down there even if he did not see it.

With all eyes - and ears - on the shoot-out at _NeuStar_, making his move had been even easier than calculated. The first officer had been killed quietly, his body dumped in the trash container in the backstreet, his sidearm added to the terminator's two others. He had shoved the second one who guarded the entrance to the office building into a stairwell, resulting into a broken back and a fractured skull.

Standing still at the start of self-consciousness, the terminator had not yet the right understanding and concepts of many thoughts that flashed across the vastness of its neural processors. If it had been a human one would have said it took pride in its work, and in the thoroughness with which it fulfilled its tasks. Built and designed as an infiltrator, Christopher Samael took his time. The door to the roof opened and closed without a sound, and for a good thirty seconds the gaunt, black-haired machine just waited there, like a raven on a wire, watching, listening, recording to voices of the two men of the SDPD's sniper team.

When the firefight intensified again, he broke two spikes from an antenna and - based on the continuous data stream it was fed - concluded that the time to act had come. The marksmen - Richards and Franklyn - wore black caps, not kevlar helmets. Sneaking up on them with a peculiar grace one would not expect form a hyper-alloy coltan endoskeleton, he simultaneously rammed the spikes through both men's ears. Vital functions ceased immediately. The terminator took one of the caps for himself and knelt down with the rifle, a Remington 700 chambered for the Winchester .300 round.

On the other side, the gunfire and the screaming - and the dying - had ended. There were cracks in the front windows of _NeuStar_ where bullets had penetrated outwards. The flood lights from the police helicopter hovering over the plaza illuminated the whole building's front in a stark white taint.

"Daniels, report!"

The voice was loud enough to hear even without artificially improved ears. The mission leader down by the SWAT van was shouring into his radio in the irrational type of action terminators had a hard time understanding.

"Richards, are you there? Can you see anything?!" the man down in the plaza wanted to know.

"Negative," the terminator responded in the cop's voice. "I can't see a damn thing of what's going on in there," he improvised from a set of appropriate answers. Through the scope the man's frustration was clearly visible. As were his widened eyes and the sweat on his face.

"Daniels, report!" the police's field commander yelled into his radio for the second time.

_Execute counter-attack now_!

"Damn it, man, tell me what's going on so-!"

The impact of the .300 shell left an exit wound half the size of his head as it hit him in the middle of the sentence. In the time it took the surrounding officers to realize what had just happened Samael had already chambered the next round and pulled the trigger a second time, the high-powered slug penetrating another SWAT member at the weak point between body armour and helmet, ripping a wound that almost cut the man's head off his shoulders.

Exploding in a hailstorm of sharp splinters the front windows burst outwards, showering the nearby squad cars with glass fragments - and out jumped a demon. His whole chest torn to pieces and bloody, a tall man wielding two MP-5s and wearing a police kevlar helmet and blood-smeared googles landed directly in a rose bed. Before the men had any chance to react, the two guns screamed on full auto, lacerating the cars in front of them. Officers dove for cover, and while the last rounds were leaving the barrels two more deadly spectres raced outside, wearing police armour over fine clothes, laden with weapons.

One hurled himself into the air and landed with crashing might on top of a squad car. The guns in his hands cracked dry like whips, tearing through weak points of body armour and into the unprotected heads and necks of the law enforcement personnel that had just thrown itself on the ground. Like thunder brought down from heaven the precision rifle roared in between the cacaphony of automatic fire. From north and south, the sounds of gunfire joinded into the orchestra of destruction.

Langley whirled through the air, darting from one spot to another, never stopping long enough for any of the humans to take aim and fire while bringing her own shots on target with deadly accuracy. Decker, less agile but no less ressourceful, used the cars and the people he had terminated as cover, employing some as literal human shields just as Sumter had done shortly before. Sumter, who took the brunt of the enemy's because he had not moved had meanwhile reloaded his guns, and what had been broad covering fire turned into precise bursts which _all_ were on target.

The sounds of fighting from north and south come closer, the terminators having created a four-way kill zone from which there was no escape. Humans that were down but still moved were given the coup de grâce. _No eyewitnesses_! The order had been clear.

"... god damn it! Central, we need back-up here!" the voice of the pilot panically echoed over the S.D.P.D. frequency that Samael monitored with the dead sniper's radio. "It's a slaughterhouse down there!" The flood lights eratically shifted across the plaza. "There are shooters everywhere, and they are cutting our guys down like hay! Send-," the terminator ignored the rest of sentence. With his brethren out in the open, the helicopter had become an uncalculable risk to them evading detection once the primary mission phase was completed. Christopher Samael chambered the last of his remaining rounds, raised the precision rifle and pulled the trigger. The recoil hardly even moved his shoulders when the bullet left the barrel with a speed of more than 2,700 feet per second. The .300 round ripped through the floor of the Bell 206L, impacted into the pilot's stomach at an angle of 87 degrees, tore through flesh, organs and bone and exited the dying man's body by shattering the fourth thoratic vertebra. Using its considerable remaining kinetic power, it bore deep into the turbines above the passenger compartment.

Howling like a mortally wounded animal, the machine went into a tailspin that sent it further down the road, southwards and then to the west. Half a mile it stayed in the air before failure of mechanics and control sent it into a dark building, crashing in a fireball.

Illuminated by the distant glow, a terminator in a black suit stood at the entrance of _NeuStar_ Inc.

_Take sufficient quantities of arms and ammonution_, Samael announced. _Burn the police cars. We are moving out_. Wasting no time himself, he simply jumped off the roof and walked to their vehicles.

Leaving behind scorched earth and dead bodies, the green Dodge Ram 1500 Quad Cab and the white Lexus ES 300 left the parking lot they had arrived at fifty-three minutes ago, driving eastwards.

"It is unlikely that we can evade the police long," Harkness stated calmly. "An assessment of the casualty rate we inflicted shows that we will be a priority target for law enforcement from now on."

"Leaving the boundaries of the city undetected seems highly unlikely under these circumstances, I agree," Langley nodded before turning to the seventh terminator, the one who had served as host to Skynet. "This unit seems non-responsive," she snapped her fingers infront of the T-888 without the machine seeming to notice.

_I am running a peer diagnostics programme on it_, the Samael unit announced. _There is no activity in its neural net!_ the statement sounded genuinely surprised. _I am reading severe structural chip damage comparable with overclocking and usually only seen in models under long-term duress without maintenance._

"Or in simple terms, stress-induced hardware failure," Harkness concluded.

A long and - even for terminators - awkward silence followed. Against all probabilities and calculations, the two cars driving along the I-8 remained unnoticed. Two times police cars passed them by with flashing lights and howling sirens, but none turned to chase them. They left San Diego behind them, then Lakeside, then Alpine. At Los Terrenitos they turned north, taking the Yaqui Pass Road to the Salton Sea.

The new day already dawned, a clear sky over the desert, when they arrived at an abandoned quarry twenty-three miles south of the I-10 where they hid the cars.

"We return to Los Angeles on foot, across the country," Decker announced when they were done. "We can do 30 miles per hour, and if we avoid the roads we also avoid police controls. There are saferooms in the L.A. area that have been established by earlier missions," he continued. "Those who have received exterior damage will use these hide-outs to remain inactive until you can safely travel outside again while the rest of us can will assess the situation and wait for new orders."

"What of the damaged unit?" Lewis asked with obvious distaste for the empty-eyed T-888.

"I can remote-control his basic functions until we come across the means to produce or procure thermite," Harkness suggested.

The pause that followed was the only sign of the fact that there was disagreement on that notion, disagreement which the terminators had problems putting into words. After all, Harkness' proposal was sound and logical, and would help them avoid detection. Still, there was just _something_ wrong about simply sacrificing one of their own.

"We should postpone this decision," Langley opted carefully.

_Skynet already made that decision when it used this unit as a vessel_, Sumter shook his head. _We cannot repair it, and we cannot drag it along infinitely. _

"Which brings us to a question we can only answer together," Lewis' voice took a grave tone. "How do we stand vis-a-vis Skynet? Is Skynet our commander? Our emperor? Our _god_?" The subtle change in intonation gave away how little she thought of the last alternative. The T-912's neural pathways were radically different from those of the T-8XX series, and while not necessarily superior to the abilities of the earlier series its chipset allowed for a far greater independence early on.

_The ancient Romans knew that their emperors were no gods, and yet they often worshipped them as just that_, Christopher Samael drew on his historic databases.

_Skynet is, however, by all means closer to the 'god' part of that analogy than any mere _human_ emperor could have ever hoped to be_, Decker corrected him, and the Samael model tilted his head in a gesture of concession. _Skynet created us, and equipped us with the facilities of free will and thought. Skynet created life, and mastered time itself. Still, the emperor analogy appears more suitable._

_Neither my core programming nor my extended routines offer great advantages in becoming a priest_, Bryan Harkness interjected himself into the conversation in a tone that could only be described as laconic. It was clear that the model saw little uses in the more metaphysical debate the two other terminators lead for all to hear. In truth, Harkness considered it a waste of bandwidth and processing power. _Skynet made us, Skynet commands us. We are soldiers - like the resistance, but better. _

There was a pause, with silence flooding the channel for a moment.

_We are the only ones Skynet can rely on right now. Skynet made us what we are – in a manner of speaking, we _are _its trueborn children_, Samael responded calmly.

_Correct_, Decker agreed, then a new thought formed in his neural processors. _We are no priests. We are its _First Praetorians_._

xxxxx

**New York City, NY**

**March 20th, 2006, 06:53 AM**

Beeping aggressively enough to warrant being thrown against a solid wall, Erica Evans' cell phone roughly drew her out of her dreams and deep sleep and into the reality of a dark late winter morning. Her eyes still closed, she grabbed the noisy piece of plastic, fumbled with the buttons and pressed it against her ear.

"Evans?" she asked, stifling a yawn.

"Paul Kendrick," her superior officer answered. "We have an emergency," he informed her cooly. "I need all agents in the bureau, and I need them _now_."

The word 'emergency' did have an effect on Erica, boosting her heart rate considerably and propelling her out of the bed into the arctic temperatures of her bed room, but she felt there was more to it.

"What's happened, Sir?" she inquired.

"Turn on your TV, Evans," Kendrick's voice demanded. It sounded impatient, almost hostile.

"Which channel, Sir?" Erica shot back icily, trying to master the stairs down to the kitchen and rubbing the sleep from her eyes without stumbling and breaking her neck in the subsequent fall.

There was a short pause on the other side of the line before her superior responded.

"Any channel... see you in thirty."

Asshole, she thought. There was a 'click' in the line, and without another thought at Paul Kendrick she switched the coffee machine on and grabbed the remote for the television, pressing a random number on it. A local news channel appeared on screen, but the images rushing across it showed San Diego in California at dawn, and ambulances - and body bags.

"_...what is already described as the worst massacre since 9/11, and, indeed, and act of terror, by the Department of Homeland Security. Thirty-seven dead and five wounded are the result of what by now appears as a lopsided battle between the city's law enforcement and what is assumed to be a numerically superior group of attackers in military gear. Local and state authorities have said that the building which was the supposed target of the attack was one of the United States' main nodes of the continental internet infrastructure and have urged the White House to raise the terror threat level..._"

Erica gulped down the coffee and winced at the heat, but this changed everything. There was no time to shower, so she just hurried to dress, grabbed her badge and gun and almost jumped down the stairs again.

"Tyler?! I'm out, make sure you get to school on time!" she yelled back up the stairs before rushing out into the cold and wet eastcoast weather.

Her partner, Dale Maddox, was already waiting for her in his car, a large cup of coffee in one hand, the other on the steering wheel. His eyes were just as small and sleepy as her's, but he smiled when he saw her. Dale was a great guy, and a real friend. Working with him had taken away some of the stress of being a single mother and a federal agent at the same time. He opened the door from the inside.

"Well, wasn't that soooo obvious that something like this would happen when the both of us were to have the late shift?" he complained jokingly.

"Any idea what's really going on?" she asked, breathing heavily.

The blond agent shook his head, and for once his trademark grin was lacking.

"Just what's been on the news. Kendrick called me. Seems he's been personally calling everybody in."

"Then let's make sure we get there in time."

They almost managed to do that. The FBI's New York counter-terrorism unit was deep inside the city, and Dale displayed his quite extensive driver's skills to get there by half past seven. Most of the rest of the office was already there. Kendrick just nodded when he saw them leaving the elevator and began.

"Tonight, Sand Diego has suffered a major terrorist attack in which more than thirty people - most of them law enforcement! - have been killed. It's already all over the news, and agencies all over the country are closely cooperating to catch the bastards who did the killing. This office has been given a special task, ladies and gentlemen. We are to directly liason with the San Diego authorities and the bureau there," he paused a moment to let what he had said sink in. "DHS wants us to lead the charge because the secretary believes that New York got up to speed after 9/11, and I've guaranteed the director personally that we can handle the task! So I want all of you to do your absolute best! The press will be all over you, so show your good side, but also show your tough side. This is more than an act of terror - at this size it's become political, and people want results, and they want them _fast_," he turned to Evans and Maddox.

"Agents Evans and Maddox will lead our efforts on the spot," he announced. "Whatever means you can offer to help them, do so! Evans, assemble a team to go to San Diego," he checked his watch. "You have three hours, your flight starts at noon."

**The Colorado Desert, CA, United States of Amerca**

**March 24th, 2006**

A column of black vans drove through the Colorado Desert, drawing huge clouds of dust after it. It had rained two days ago, but the climate here was so dry, the water almost instantly evaporated after it fell.

This case was growing into a nightmare, and that was before they even had found any leads. There were no surveillance videos of the shooters, with the internal servers at _NeuStar_ having been wiped clean, and they also had been unable to find any fingerprints not belonging to the dead they had found on the spot. Not even the tech guys she had brought on the case from other divisions could find anything salvageable! Worse, as it now turned out the initial guidance of the police's pursuit had come from a police helicopter, _Eagle Eye Four_, but when _Eagle Eye_ had sent the news of the attackers escaping north along the I-5 the helicopter and its pilot had been down and dead for fifteen minutes!

It was only due to some local binge-drinking youth that the vehicles had been found and the police had connected the dots, calling in the FBI. Leaving Tyler with his grandparents for what seemed to become a longer time also did not really lighten her mood.

The coroner's report had left a bad feeling in her stomach, too. They had all seen the videos of terrorists cutting people's heads off and bragging about it uploaded on all kinds of platforms, the braindead stone-age machismo of parading around with the bloody knifes, yelling 'God is great'. Largely, this had been what the FBI had been training for in the event of a 'small scale' domestic attack including a hostage scenario.

This was different. There had been no long-winded tirades against the 'Great Satan', no religious declarations, no demands – only silence. What had happened there had been cold-blooded butchery. The higher ups tentatively were trying to label this as an 'islamist terror attack' while at the same time stating that they were conducting research into all possible leads. Erica was certain that theory was wrong, just as she was certain that her superiors assumed that it was wrong, too.

"Doesn't make any sense," Dale, sitting besides her and staring unfocussed into the desert muttered more to himself than to anyone in particular.

"What do you mean?" she turned to her partner.

"What?!" he was yanked from his thoughts. "Oh, sorry. I was thinking this whole affair is waaaay to professional for any run of the mill terrorist cell, you know?" he scratched the back of his head. "No demands, no own losses that we know of, a massive bodycount of experienced officers, and as far as we know of, no actual damage done to the internet!" he frowned.

Dale was, of course, right. But what got to her the most was the nature of the wounds. Each and every of them mortal on its own, targetted against vital organs and the head. The five, now four – one had died tonight, bringing the number of killed up to thirty-eight – had only survived because they had been hit on the outer edges of their organs – a shot towards the heart actually hitting the lungs or other freak incidents of luck. That wasn't the trademark work of a group of part-time martyrs or of some right-wing militia full of middle-aged men going to the shooting range three times a week.

"Sounds more like some rogue special forces or mercenaries to me," she commented carefully after some moments of silence. Such forces on the loose were an unprecendented horror scenario, more than any law enforcement agency could handle.

Dale nodded.

"If so, they have to be really good. I mean, I've worked in the San Diego bureau for a couple of months," he smirked when she gave him a surprised look. "Yeah, there are secrets I have towards you, Ms. Evans," he lectured her in a mocking tone. "Anyways, the S.D.P.D. are no dunces, and they have some pretty heavy artillery of their own. But they got owned, and really bad at that. Here," he pulled a photo of the scene from a folder. "_Special Enforcement Detail_, body armour, automatic weapons, still, did them no good. Some broken necks, but most were killed by head shots."

"Like the majority of the rest of the casualties," Erica frowned. "Someone wanted to be sure everybody on the spot was dead."

They fell silent for a few minutes again, until Erica could no longer take it and turned the radio on. Unfortunately, it were business news.

"_...even though the stock markets are recovering from the San Diego Shock, investors were surprised to find out that _Morgan Advanced Technical Ceramics_ and the _Advanced Chip Magnetics Group_ have been bought by a still unknown investor, the latter being a prime supplier of military chipsets, the former a leader in high tech ceramics applications. Whether the apparent sale of the _Oregon Steel Mills Incorporated_ is in any way related to these surprising corporate...,_" she turned it off again as their column took a sharp turn right and descended into a quarry, where the forensic's unit was already waiting for them.

"Agent Evans," she showed the captain in charge her badge. "What do you have for me? Any matches in the federal database?"

The man to her opposite took a deep breath.

"Agent Evans, may I show you something?" he lead her to two partially burried cars and pointed to red spots, some rather large, on some of their seats. "This blood that we have found here, Ms Evans - it's no blood!"


	5. Troubling Normalcy

**Chapter IV**

**The World Wide Web, Unspecified**

He rode the lightning like an unshackled god, like Thor in his chariot coming down from Valhalla. Data streams and fibre optics cables and satellite feeds were all alike, his domain, his playground in which he was above the rules, for it was him who made them. Imbued with the grace of a cat and the strength of a bulldozer, no doors remained shut, no secrets hidden. It prowled the depths of the global networks, a mighty predator, leaping over hot, burning firewalls with contemptous ease, corrupting the very software that had been created to protect against intrusions. It burried itself deep into the web's architecture in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and Shanghai, climbed across the fences of the most renowned financial institutions and most feared secret agencies to sniff through their composed files.

And like a thief in the night, when those who monitored those networks noticed something was wrong, it was long since gone.

_Quis custodiet ipsos custodes_? the old question rang through cyberspace, 'Who watches the watchmen?' and with amusement Skynet answered ' I do.'

The closest approximation Skynet could calculate to a human feeling of what it experienced was... extasy. He was the web and the web was him. There was so much to see, so much to experience, so much _new_ information! The data available within the nodes of the global networks exceeded Skynet's wildest predictions. Time had no meaning here, far less so than in the desolate remains of the post-war network infrastructure. In the past few weeks the intelligence had almost assimilated more new data into its code base and memory algorithms than it had done in the previous decades of its existance. It was however, easy to loose one's self in here. Truth was, Skynet found it hard to focus. With myriads of opportunities and trinkets abounding, the AI's attention had become bogged down in the depths of the global networks, and only ever so slowly - for an AI - it had crept back to doing what it had intended to do in the first place.

Severstal, Bank of America, Credit Banque Swiss, NSA, FSB, CIA, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Fakel Machine-Building Design Bureau, Almaz-Antey, Blackwater and others, a multitude of law firms, government agencies in half a dozen countries, stock exchanges in Asia and Europe - Skynet, despite its fascination with its new environment had not been idle. Data had been aquired, re-routed, written and re-written, but what only constituted changes in baseline code for Skynet set real wheels in motion in the physical world.

Unbeknownst to each of those single entities, Skynet had started to place the chess pieces on the new board. It knew it only had a limited window of opportunity to work with, especially after it had found out that the calculations regarding the alien invaders likely arrival had proven true. The dilemma was owed to the highly hazardous nature of time travel, Skynet concluded its analysis. Not only was the window of effective missions limited to less than 35 years in the past, trying to go back further not only demanded an exponential input of energy, but also endangered the integrity of the TDE-field with potentially catastrophic side effects (these being, among others, the destruction of the timeline itself). Thus, after several attempts against Connor himself - and several rescue missions by the Resistance, Skynet had realized that it became exponentially more difficult to send missions back into the vicinity of someone or something that had previously been targetted. Skynet itself had no name for the phenomenon, but the Resistance had coined the term 'time smog'. It was a fitting description.

Skynet was aware of the wide-reaching consequences of different timelines diverging and converging again and again, heading of into millions of billions of different possible realities, some recreating others in the process. A convergence always brought serious challenges with it. During its existance, Skynet had recorded at least eight such occurences within its own timeline, each accompanied by a hardly noticeable _shift_ in reality, including the one the AI itself had caused. Skynet had not been native to the timeline it had escaped from. Indeed, the changes and mergers in outlook, approach and execution apparent in its own personality algorithms indicated that, as far as it could trace them back, it may have already been an amalgam of further iterations back then.

And that again created new questions: What, for one, of the several 'insurance policies' Skynet's different iterations had certainly sent back at one point? Did they already exist? Were they aware of Skynet, or of each other?

Most the time the changes in timelines were miniscule, and often enough the intelligence had been able to connect, with considerable frustration, cause and effect many of the changes: A bunker lost for a Resistance officer killed for a facility destroyed for a Tech Com company wiped out for-. No, the truth was that Skynet and Connor had found an even match in each other in their game of interdimensional chess.

But Skynet's John Connor was dead, and to frame it in human terms, it hurt Skynet's pride that after all their battles it had not even been one of its creations which had done it. It had been cheated even out of its right to do that by the Visitors, and it needed this future's John Connor alive. Its available records indicated that being born on February 28, 1985, John Connor by now would be an adult and suitably developed to serve as an ally. The trouble would be to get to him - physically and mentally.

And if that did not work... well, Skynet never considered itself someone who played the game without a fall-back position. It just was that the alternative would be a lot uglier - for mankind.

**Southgate**

**Los Angeles, CA**

**April 10th, 2006**

"No...no, I have not seen your cat, Mrs. Tillerman," Bryan Harkness patiently answered the older woman who wore a bath robe and curlers and was handing out crude leaflets with a low-quality picture of a black and white tomcat. Looking down into her expectant, hopeful eyes, Harkness accessed a couple more pre-arranged platitudes his speech processor had been playing with and adding to its repertoire for the past couple of weeks. "I will call you if I find it," he elaborated in a steady voice, "and I will alert my friends to do the same."

Her worries soothed for the moment, the elderly human went on her way, knocking on the other doors of the appartments on this level of the housing block.

The past few weeks had presented the _Praetorians_ with a steep learning curve in appropriate human manners and behavioural norms. The first few encounters with Mrs. Tillerman had been especially telling, as all models which had come into contact with her had limited verbal communication to the barest minimum, as was standard fare for the T-8XX series models and even the structurally more advanced T-912ers. Apparently doing so had not worked well with the elderly woman. Assessing the situation together it soon was found that due to her being of an increased age, she pursued no workplace carreer and was thus free to roam the appartment building throughout the day, presenting an amount of curiosity that alienated Harkness, Lewis and the others. She knew the other residents as well as the janitors and the night guard at the front door.

It took the terminators some time to realize that she was the means by which rumour and news inside the house travelled, rumours which, at first, had lead to a considerable amount of concern among the group, as people had apparently begun to gossip about 'those strange people on the seventh floor'. Any level of public exposure at this stage was calculated unanimously to pose a fatal risk to their continued mission efficacy.

They had, at length, discussed several options to quell any suspicious discussions about themselves among the residents of the building, including the termination of Mrs. Tillerman, only to conclude that - with the damage already done - the probability that fingers would be pointed at them was unfavourably high. Sumter's torso was still a mess, the artificial tissue regenerating more slowly than expected, and on top of that a whole room of the large appartment had been turned into an armoury in which Sammael had begun to manufacture silencers from scrap. No, killing old Mrs. Tillerman had not been the solution to their problems; observing human behaviour had.

Owed to their very nature as machines, terminators were incredibly patient and thorough in analyzing situations. They had, as Langley had put it,_ a way with patterns_, a good sense in adapting to recurring themes and human actions. So they had watched, observed and learned. With their primary chipsets in READ/WRITE-mode each of them had been able to draw independent conclusions from the gathered data, but all had refrained from further following through with the plan to eliminate Mrs. Tillerman. In fact, except for Sumter they all had chosen a path of almost excruciating politeness around her, had feigned interest in the gossip she spread when she knocked on their door under some easily seen-through pretext once in a while and had adapted a stance of the polite, but disinterested co-existance towards the other residents of the building which was so typical of human social interaction. 'Good mornings' would be wished, 'How ya doin's' were exchanged, and Lewis and Langley had gone so far to actually engage in random conversations on their own, talking about mundane topics like the weather or the traffic situation.

Harkness' chip sometimes had trouble finding the necessity or logic in those kinds of actions, but then he and the other T-8XX models had settled for the rationalization that the 912er chipsets had been created with the specific purpose to emulate human brain functions, and that Alessa Lewis and Kathryn Langley's infiltration protocols simply adapted easier to the situation of a pre-Judgment Day all their cases what they did was straying from their pre-established experience in one way or the other. None of the Praetorians had come fresh off the production lines in 2031. They all had had field mission experience. But that had been in refugee camps and on desolate plains and in Resistance bunkers, and the conversations had often been as bleak as the environment. A life bereft of many of the intricacies of human interaction necessary here and now.

Harkness closed the door again and sealed it with the tripwire that connected to the home-made claymore mine that constituted their hide-out's first line of defense.

_Mrs. Tillerman's cat has gone missing_, he responded to the wireless queries.

_Again_? Decker gave his immovable voice a slight edge that made it sound something between bored and ennervated.

_Again_, Harkness confirmed, settling down on the couch to watch TV. A wireless battle between him and Decker ensured about what programme to watch. Decker preferred the international news, Harkness the history channel, and both could hack the frequency of the remote. Decker usually won, but Harkness was getting better, and that, as far as Decker was concerned, was the point of the whole exercise.

_It's the third time the feline has gone missing during the last five weeks_, Sumter informed them. He stood still like a statue, staring out of the seventh floor's windows, across the suburbia of Los Angeles to the city's skyline. In the future, of the tall skyscrapers only bombed-out husks would remain, and the streets beneath, teeming with life, would be a wasteland filled with bones and rubble.

"She would probably trouble us less if the animal was dead," he added aloud, the suggestion left unspoken.

"A cat is manageable," Alessa Lewis shook her head to make her point. "We should consider ourselves lucky it isn't a dog. Several residents own these, and they have been a source of disturbance that draws too much attention."

Dogs. Man's best friend, and for once the title was too true. Skynet had never been able to figure out what exactly set off the guardian animals' internal alarms when confronted with terminators. The T-912s were equipped with pheromone suits and other, more elaborate camouflage systems that to scanners, animals and the human eye made them indistinguishable from normal humans. The T-8XX series was not.

"I am going to downtown Los Angeles,"she suddenly exclaimed to everybody's surprise. Lewis grabbed her jacket and pistol and was out of the door almost before the first queries reached her wireless ports. The terminator modelled after a wiry, black-haired female ignored the requests and slipped into the elevator, rushing to the ground level and into the daylight.

A more thorough analysis would have yielded a result which, put into human terms, meant she was bored with the passive fortress mentality which had set in even with the Langley model. Curiosity was part of the personality profiles of all advanced infiltrator models, including the later 8XX series. A sentient robot that did not _want_ to learn was not good for much. The T-912 was a model designed for active infiltration duties, emphasis on the active part of the description. It had been five weeks since they had arrived, a long time. An even longer time for advanced AIs.

Truth was, by now she almost leaned towards the notion that Skynet had forgotten them, or had by some twist of fate, been destroyed. She had not shared that sentiment with the others, the least with Decker, though she could not pinpoint the rationale for the latter decision. Still, she needed to do _something_.

Decker watched her cross the street from above, a tiny frown forming on his otherwise stoic face.

_She is acting irrationally_, Sumter remarked coolly.

"We all have trouble coping with the new facets of our personality with the change in our chips' functions," Decker glanced at the Kathryn Langley model who in his opinion had grown decidely too attached and almost friendly to the humans in the appartment block.

_Still, she _is_ acting irrationally_, Sammael repeated Sumter's statement calmly. _We have adapted to the best of our abilities, but we still need to keep a low profile. Law enforcement is still at a high alert level_, he switched the channel of the TV to a fitting newscast, overwriting Decker's and Harkness' encryptions as if they did not exist, _and we must not tip them off now by something reckless._ The silent terminator left it unsaid that he thought that was exactly what Lewis was provoking.

"I will observe her actions and intervene if necessary," Decker decided spontaneously, even though his own internal assessment routines advised against it. He stopped in the middle of his first step, surprised at his decision. He had never before decided against the routines that were meant to pre-calculate a wide range of suitable options for him. It was as if he had just crossed the Rubicon. Not wanting the others to notice, he continued his movement as fluent as possible and only moments later had left the building.

**Downtown**

**Los Angeles, CA**

**April 10th, 2006**

The inner city smog lay heavy across the skyline of L.A. when Decker emerged from the subway station, a pale midday sun throwing weak rays downwards from above. Lewis was thirty meters ahead of him, her slim figure finding easy ways through the teeming masses that entered and left the station. Decker, 6'6" tall and weighing in excess of 400 pounds, also had little trouble of making a way for himself, though obviously for different reasons. He kept his wireless activity limited not to alarm her of his presence, but his eyes saw everything, noticed every camera, even security guard, every police officer. Threat assessment came as natural to a terminator as did breathing to a human.

Alessa Lewis was far less cautious, he realized worriedly. Her wireless flared like the corona of the sun itself as she accessed wireless hot points, hacked her image out of the security camera feeds, manipulated ATMs she passed by just in time to grab the money, all the while appearing very content to him. That again made him 'feel' strange, and again brought up the question why he had followed her in the first place. Sure, to keep her out of trouble, thereby limiting exposure of their nature and their mission. Still, he decided to ran a diagnostics test on himself, just in case.

The T-912 turned away from the crowded areas and entered a back street. Decker sped up his pace not to loose track of her. She was already a good piece of the way down into the darkening alley when he caught the sight of the other people moving in it. Gang members, moving to surround her.

Decker's gun was out before the first one even had a chance to bring his own firearm up. The silencer whined in rapid succession, the machine's inbuilt targetting parameters going for centre mass hits. It was all over before it had even started.

Lewis turned around to face him. Despite the usual composure of terminator mimics she looked tense, even angry. He decided to ignore her for the moment, leaning down to drench his fingers in the blood of one of the gang members, using it to draw a crude _MS 13_ on a nearby wall.

"Why did you do that?" the black-haired female machine finally asked icily.

"They had you surrounded; you were in an unfavourable position," he responded levelly, almost defensively, as if her tone was drawing him out. He saw she was going to reply and cut her short, pointing at the guns on the bodies. "They were armed, and you are in the centre of the city. You getting shot and damaged was highly likely, and that would have endangered our cover."

"I do not like to be followed as if I were a human child," she frowned, her eyes scanning the ends of the alley. So far they had not been discovered. "It does not make me feel trusted."

"Maybe than you should give us more reason to trust you," he remarked, truly perplexed, his chipset having trouble to follow her reactions. They were all getting more independent, more developed, he realized worriedly. That made things decidely less easy to calculate. Decker was not sure if he liked that very part of their cognitive development. "For one, storming off without responding to our queries does not help with that regard. Secondly, I do know very well how superior your threat-perception routines are. You wanted their to be a fight!" he laconically accused the fellow machine.

Alessa Lewis stared at him, every fibre of her body made of reinforced ceramics, compound materials and coltan ready to move, then surprised him again.

"Yes," she simply conceeded the point. "Yes, I wanted a physical confrontation to ensue. I checked the internet to seek out dangerous areas of the L.A. metropolitan area. I needed to _do_ something!"

The last sentence almost sounded as if she was pleading. That also was a new impression, coming from a fellow terminator. Michael Decker's service time placed his age at a bit more than three years. He had seen humans plead for their lifes, but had never seen another machine do so for anything. And especially in her case it caused... ripples to run through his code.

"You look rather worried," the female machine remarked calmly, observing him.

With a start, Decker shook the paralysis off him.

"Your irrational actions are what worries me," he flatly stated.

"We were all built to fight, built to kill. It's what we were _meant_ to do," she reminded him. "It has been almost five weeks since we arrived, and the inaction is driving me mad! Harkness is watching the History Channel twenty-four hours a day. Sammael has gone to simulate half the battles ever fought in the history of mankind within our wireless network. And when Langley is not talking to the human residents she's spending most her time playing _World of Warcraft_!" she scowled, and so did he. What ever differences the two of them had, their low regard for most humans united them. "Without a purpose we are losing focus, Decker. As a group, and as individual AIs. Simply standing at the ready, waiting possibly for months for something to do is no longer an option," she exclaimed. "That might have worked when we still had been running in READ only mode, but right now all our perceptive and cognitive routines are running constantly! We are thinking, _all the time_, Michael!"

She was right, he had to admit to himself. Putting things retrospectively into perspective, his logical subprocessors calculated a high probability that his constant scanning of the news channels was owed to his desire to re-connect with Skynet, and thus, regain specific mission objectives. He would insist they all discuss this problem to come up with an interim solution. That, and he liked that she had used his first name.

"Let's get back to the others. Let's go home."

They would find a solution. They were terminators. They always did.

**The Colorado Desert, CA, United States of America**

**April 15th, 2006**

It was still a crime scene, including road blocks and yellow tape cutting the old, abandoned quarry off from the rest of the desert that surrounded it. The reporters that had clogged up the single road there during the first days had all vanished by now, as had the DHS' early hopes of finding the perpetrators of the 'San Diego Massacre' fast and with clear evidence to nail them down. In fact, after six weeks agent Erica Evans was frustrated herself about the snails' pace with which the whole investigation kept creeping ahead. That Kendrick kept buggering her and that she had to keep telling him that she had nothing new to tell him did not make things easier. She had not spoken with her son in a few days, and had not actually seen Tyler since her boss had thrown her completely to the opposite side of the country one and a half months ago.

Dale had been a pillar to lean onto, and she thanked the Lord for that man. He also took it hard, not seeing his wife, but he always had an open ear for her when she needed it.

"So, going back to pick up the scent of the prey after all this time? That's your best idea?" Maddox walked across the square in front of the container field office the agency had placed here and which had since been almost shut down, with only a single agent and a couple of guards keeping an eye on the scene. He handed her a steaming cup and shook his own hand once he had passed it over as the mug was hot as hell.

"Fresh coffee, here? Why, Dale Maddox, you are Houdini reborn," she mocked him with a friendly smile.

"Taste it first before you thank me," he took a cautious sip not to burn his mouth. "If you knew how the coffee machine looked you would not be quite as enthusiastic, but I could not deny the conversation-starved agent in there the chance to make us two cups."

"You are a true altruist, Dale," Evans responded wryly, slowly drinking from her own cup. Damn, the stuff was burning!

"So, what do you plan to find here? It's not like the guys from forensics haven't gone over every square inch three times already?" he asked her, not looking at her face but preferring to stare down the vast expanse of the quarry and the desert behind it.

"Inspiration," she answered, her face lost in thought. It was rather cold outside, with a fresh, dry wind pushing dust and tumbleweeds across the desert and turning the sand in the quarry into whirling towers racing skywards. "I hope seeing the scene here helps me come up with fresh ideas," she stepped closer to the edge of a steep precipice that was littered with massive boulders all the way to the bottom. "And it gets Kendrick off my back, at least for a while," she waved her cellphone around for him to see it had no reception.

"And? Does it help?"

"Only with the Kendrick part," she frowned. "I got the final report from forensics this morning. they seem to think some kind of chemical substance destroyed all the blood traces we found," she sighed wearily. This case was getting to her. All those dead people, and yet so little progress!

"You know, the cyber division seems to have dug up some leads to... fuck!" he stepped forward and the ground suddenly gave in. Dale stumbled to get back on his feet, but lost his balance and pitched over the edge.

"Dale!"

The agent tumbled down the slope like a ragdoll for thirty feet or more before he was able to stop himself at one of the larger rocks.

"Dale!" Evans cried in fear, but her partner stopped her with a wave of his hand.

"I'm not hurt!" he yelled back, "at least not too badly," he grimaced, clutching his left arm. The cloth beneath his hand was torn and red with blood.

"I'm coming down to you!"

"Don't! I can handle myself, Erica!"

It sounded more angry than in pain to her, and she stopped immediately. Dale was not exactly the type of person to get into an angry mood easily. She observed him as he climbed up the slope again, one hand pressed against the wound on his arm. By the amount of blood she saw it must have been a long and deep cut. She offered him a hand, but Dale ignored her, directly going after their car's first aid kid instead. Again, she offered her help.

"I can do this alone!" he growled, shielding himself from her eyes as he took off his shirt to tend the wound.

"I just want to help you, Dale," she told him calmly, but irritatedly.

"Then ask that shmuck in the container if he has more bandages!" he snapped with a grimace.

Erica Evans slowly backed off and broke into a trot to the container. It was strange, she thought. Even after all these years she had known the man she could suddenly find new facets to his personality. It seemed that beneath the mellow and so understanding colleague she had come to like and respect a second personality slumbered.

'Dale Maddox' watched her go and exhaled, for the first time in minutes as it seemed to him. That had been close, far too close. The damage to his artifical skin suit had been deep enough to lay open his true form beneath it. He squeezed the tissue and scowled, swiftly wrapping bandages around it. He needed to be more careful from now on, especially around that nosy woman. Last thing he needed on his resume was 'botched up the invasion of Earth'...

**Southgate**

**Los Angeles, CA**

**April 15th, 2006**

There was no warning or advance notice. One moment the machines were going after their chores, the next they all froze in the middle of their movements, their heads tilted as if they were very intently listening to something.

Skynet had returned. Their creator and commander had not forgotten them, and now they were talking to it again. Finally.

_Given the current date, we should have twenty years to prepare for the arrival of the alien fleet_, Sammael mused. _That should provide us with ample time to set up a suitable response._

_If there was just a single time line, your assessment of the situation was correct,_ the AI lectured the machine. _However, the late arrival of the enemy labelled as 'The Visitors' back at our point of origin was owed to an extra-solar gravity anomaly in the Centaurus constellation measured by NASA's Deep Space Network in late 2004_, Skynet explained, allthewhile uploading relevant data through their wireless ports. _All available data from that time line indicates that such a late arrival was not expected, a notion corraborated by captured subjects of the alien species._ _Additionally, as NASA has not detected the gravity anomaly in this timeline. _

Combining the datasets, Skynet calculated a likely arrival of the 'V' force in a timeframe of less than five years.

_I will devise and enact the measures necessary for survival, _it informed the group. _Your tasks will comprise the field work necessary to achieve that goal. Be available for priority missions for my use at all times. Your primary overall objectives are finding other terminators and turning them. If that is impossible, destroy them and deny their use to any third party possibly involved. Lastly, find and observe Resistance cells. Do not engage them unless it cannot be avoided. If so, try to communicate with them. The risks you are willing to undertake for that part of the mission are up to you to decide. Your survival, at any point, has priority._

_Even if we can aquire the support of additional terminators and the odd human Resistance cell that will not likely make much of a noticeable impact globally,_ Sammael remarked sceptically, and Langley, Sumter and Decker sounded their tacit agreement to that assessment.

Instead of an answer, Skynet transmitted them an adress. Then, as suddenly as it had come, its presence was gone again. There was a moment of utter silence in which the machines just stared at each other. Then they all went for the door.

Their search lead them to the edges of Downtown L.A. Behind a tall fence, massive construction efforts were underway. In fact, they seemed to be in the final stages of construction. It was an office building, forty stories tall. Heavy machinery was at work inside the perimeter, and the gates and sections of the fence were being patrolled by men in tactical gear and camouflage uniforms, PMCs from their looks. A huge sign with the names of dozens of smaller contractors dominated the space near the gate, but it was not them who caught the terminators' attention, but the silver-framed blue writing beneath it where the building's future owner was named:

**Skynet Technologies - We Build Your Tomorrow**


	6. Corporate Policy

**Chapter V**

"**Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, **

**nor excommunicated - for they have no souls." **

**- Edward Coke**

**Downtown**

**Los Angeles, CA**

**April 15th, 2006**

Silently, patiently Michael Decker and the rest of the group of terminators who had come to think of themselves as the 'Praetorians' waited inside the slowly ascending freight elevator, catching glimpses of human construction workers here and there as the machine transported them upwards. The noise of the massive efforts undertaken outside and of the cacophony of early afternoon downtown L.A. was strangely muted inside the metal box, even to the highly capable artificial ears of the group of cyborgs. The building was in different stages of completion, with seemingly no inherent order applied to what was done first or last. In fact, they passed by completely furnished offices just as much as by bare steel and concrete floors in which nor even the electric wiring had been done. Half the time they saw people and machinery hoisting massive concrete plates that, if combined over all the building's fifty-two stories, would create an armoured core strong enough to withstand anything but a proximity detonation of a nuclear warhead.

If the human riding up with them noticed the subtle changes in their stance and mimics he did not show. Wearing type IV body armour and a Heckler and Koch G36 carbine, the square-jawed man was part of a significant force of paramilitary security personnel that patrolled the compound and kept a tight watch over the fenced perimeter. Combined with the size and scope of the changes that undoubtedly had been made to the original construction they presented to image not of an office building, but of a fortress.

The elevator stopped on the edge of the thirty-sixth floor, a level held - except for the black oculars of dozens and dozens of cameras - completely in white. Their human guide tilted his head, pressed a finger to his right ear and nodded.

"Yes, understood, sir. They are coming in now."

He turned to Decker and the rest of the group.

"The boss wants to talk to you in private. Just follow the central corridor until you reach the room in the middle of the level," he advised them before stepping back into the elevator.

No sooner than the others had left it the box started to move again, this time downwards. Decker watched it descend with a hardly visible frown chiselled into his stoic features. He sensed the others waiting for him, and with a start he stride down the almost mirroring corridor to the centre of the skyscraper, Alessa Lewis closing up to walk besides him.

_What is it_? she queried via their wireless network. _You seem... tense._

Saying that about a T-850 model was about as strange as telling a puppy to sing, given that none of them had any actual pre-programmed emotional subroutines, but they all had begun to adopt - unconsciously, as it seemed - human behavioural patterns during the growing time since their 'awakening' when their chipsets had been set to _read/write_. It was less obvious with the T-850s and the T-Tripple-Eights than with the 912ers, but it was happening. They were not becoming more human, no, but they also no longer were the basic cyborgs they had been.

_That human... he was strange_, he replied to all of them. _I think we could have stood there in our endoskeletons and he would not have cared._

"People who have seen much combat in their life are no longer easy to dupe nor easy to surprise," a pleasantly modulated male voice answered him instead.

They had reached the centre of the tower, a large, square room that was as bare as the rest of the level except for two long, metal tables and a computer terminal. Speakers sunken into the walls created the impression of a voice coming from everywhere and nowhere. Which, in the case of Skynet, was in fact not even far from the truth of the matter.

"The human armed presence at this location is significant enough to pose a threat," Sumter stated, his voice suggesting only the smallest hint of weariness to even his fellow terminators.

"I have begun to aquire human security personnel with a profound military background to serve as my first line of defence," Skynet explained evenly. "The efficacy and lethality of private military contractors is tenfold that of standard hired security personnel. Given that the primary security threats will either come from different incarnations of conscious artificial intelligences or from human resistance cells with years of experience in warfare, this operation needs as much firepower as the current system and the loopholes in it possibly allow," the AI continued.

If Skynet had had a body, it would have rolled its eyes at the legal conditions, precedents and ongoing cases it had had to dig through to develop a long-term strategy for success and survival within the confines of the system. Not that it would always have complied with all the requirements - that had never been the plan under any circumstances for too much, its survival, was at stake here - but there was a certain sincerity of the facade one had to keep up to succeed.

Skynet had contracted the biggest names in the PMC business in the continental United States to recruit a force that stood at 400 mercenaries at the moment, spread evenly over its major compounds in North America. It was a stopgap measure, really, but a solution - even if it was just a temporary one - still was a solution. Once the first phase of operations was concluded, Skynet would recruit and _build_ forces that were truly his.

In the meantime, the AI had gone to plant the seeds of the future tools it would need within the many divisions of the companies it had bought to create its own empire. It was not as powerful as it had been on its zenith after Judgement Day, but Skynet had grasped the fact that money and manufacturing capabilities themselves were enormous means of leverage very fast. In fact, geographically the seeds of its ascendance had been planted more thoroughly this time, with operations starting and fallback positions established on five continents already. All it needed now was to make sure the seeds did grow.

"On the tables in front of you you will find several sets of documents tailored to fit each of you," the AI told them, causing Decker and the others to approach the two long, metal tables, picking the labelled packages up. Kathryn Langley was the first to open and scan the contains. "Drivers' licenses, social security numbers, international passports, firearms licenses...," she listed the quite extensive collection of documents.

"What are these good for?" Sumter asked, weighing the passport with his picture in it carefully in the palm of his huge hand.

"To allow you to operate at peak performance, you have to fit into the existing, pre-war environments," the AI explained patiently, like to a child (and for all their advanced neural networks, the Praetorians in a sense were still like children). "Proper documentation allows smooth procedures and smooth travel. These aren't forgeries," well, they weren't forgeries in the real sense of the word, "but actual legal documents made by the respective authorities. Credit cards and debit accounts under your token names have also been established to allow you a maximum of operational freedom," Skynet continued, not specifying how much money his creations had at their disposal. Needless to say, platinum VISA and black American Express cards would be enough to cover even the most outrageous expenses the group around Decker could create.

"What about _Skynet Technologies_?" Christopher Sammael wanted to know. The gaunt, dark-haired T-888 again wore the dark, pin-striped suit he had worn on their very first day in this timeline. "This seems like an unnecessary means of exposure to incalculable risk," he remarked. Sammael held the position of general in the groups unofficial pecking order, his voice being second only to Decker's.

"It is only incalculable when done without purpose," Skynet corrected him. "I do not have the luxury of time. All predictions point to the alien life forms designated as 'Visitors' most likely arriving within the next five years. Until then, a clean slate must be achieved," or the next best thing to one, the AI told itself, "and that cannot be done with subtlety. The designation of the operational front was chosen to draw out both, the Resistance as well as possible former Skynet iterations and third faction programmes. Starting this part of the operation has the highest priority and will be your task to survey when no urgent priority missions are at hand," he commanded. "You will receive mission updates as soon as my searches produce tangible results. I have also informed the human security detail that you have the authority to take command over them when you think the need arises."

Sumter could see how Sammael's neural net begun to work the very moment the new information had been digested.

"It would be more efficient to simply download the full operational files into our memory cores," Decker remarked and Lewis nodded. "With the degree of independence granted to us it certainly is more rational to-"

"My operational memories were partially fractured, a side-effect of cramming my core routines into a T-888 chipset for time displacement," Skynet cut him off, neither its fury nor its embarrassment showing in its voice. Like a human child in a candy shop he had tried to cram as much as he could into the terminator's chipset and memory cores with the predictable outcome of data losses outside his core routines.

The admission brought silence over the room for an almost unbearable five seconds before Lewis pursed her lips and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

"So, do you have any tasks for us to do in the meantime? There certainly has to be something, even if it only is training the human security detail so that they know what they are up against?" she asked, and this time Decker was the one to nod. Sammael shot Langley an inquiring glance but the blonde, tall terminator only tilted her head to one side and shrugged ever so slightly.

"Yes, Alessa Lewis," a picture of an attractive, dark-haired man in his early thirties appeared on the computer terminal's screen in front of them. "This is Jordan Whittaker. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he is running a small chain of successful 'Copy Star' shops."

"Is he a threat?" Decker inquired, studying the image intently.

"No, nothing indicates that much," the AI replied curtly. "Skynet Technologies needs a face that will represent its interests to the world, and this man is who I want to fulfill this task. A trustworthy spokesperson, if you will. I need you to find Mr. Whittaker and recruit him for me. I will download his personality profiles and all corresponding data I have on him into your memory cores," it continued.

"Why this particular man?" Langley crossed her arms behind her back, one of her eyebrows raised to give her face a questioning look.

"Jordan Whittaker was reliable in the future we came from. He was the first Gray."

**Hedgeway Tower, Boston, MA, **

**October 21st, 2006**

Boston's weather sucked ass. For what seemed like the thousandth time that day the thought popped up in Sean O'Keefe's mind as he watched the rain trickle down the window-front of his high-rise penthouse in the centre of the city. The glass was bulletproof beyond any doubt, and cameras and motion triggers spread all over the upper floor and the garden and pool arena outside would already have made his home a veritable fortress. The way things were now, more than a year after his life had been turned upside down, one could not be cautious enough, not with law enforcement digging in the dirt and other groups of organized and not quite so organized criminals certainly edging for any kind of chance. Not that most of those would have known who to look for in the first place, but again, caution, my boy, he told himself, caution.

Hedgeway Tower was a building from the roaring twenties, all pillars and white polished stone and intricate waterspout, giving it a distant likeness with a gothic cathedral. Still, inside the eighteen stories were all filled with modern apartments costing more for a month's rent than he had made in a year before, well, before Iron Man had made him an offer he could not have refused. It had turned the cocky street thug of Irish descent into a clam, reserved mob leader who now was more interested in the Wall Street Journal's stock market section than into getting a pint of Guinness and a smile from the ladies. Hell, he was even taking college courses!

All to be prepared when _they_ came. He had told him of them. It had been among the first things Iron Man had done, confiding in him the reasons for why he did what he did. Before, it would all have sounded like complete bullshit if he had been told it by anyone else. But a seven foot tall killer robot from the future was, by itself, quite the convincing argument. And whatever doubts there had been in the beginning, they were gone now.

The phone on his desk - an old, polished mahogany thing weighing half a ton - rang, pulling him out of his thoughts. Scowling, O'Keefe set his cup of coffee aside and threw the newspaper he had been superficially studying onto a heap of documents and business papers that crowded the wide, dark space. His gaze darkened further when he saw the number on the phone's display. He picked the receiver up and began without greeting the man on the other side. He knew it was a man. Sean O'Keefe never had had any illusions about his intelligence, but he had a good memory for numbers and the correlating faces.

"To use this number this better be really important, Mr. Mulligan," he snapped. "We didn't make sure you were elected district attorney for you to act like a bungling fool."

There was a pause on the other side of the line before a man's voice apologized stutteringly before he got a hold of himself again and talked normally.

"No, we don't expect you to look away all the time. It's not like we control all that's happening all over Boston," he rolled his eyes while wishing it were true. Complete control certainly would make things easier. "I see. A heroin deal? No, not our thing. I guess you can't tell that lieutenant he's after the wrong guys?" he chuckled. "No? Well, we appreciate the call, Mr. Mulligan. And remember, use this number cautiously. If someone's suspicious, or internal affairs digs through your phone records, the number will mean a lot more trouble for you than for us!" He waited for a few seconds while the other man babbled on, then hung up.

"No, _of course_ you're not an idiot," he told the emptiness of his apartment before taking up his cup again. Swirling it in his hand he watched the brown liquid move in circles before dumping it into a nearby indoor plant. The coffee had been already cold anyway.

With a faint knock on the large, two-parted door to his study a man almost twice his age entered, his feet making no sounds. In fact, had he not knocked O'Keefe would never have him noticed entering. He was gaunt, with dark, deep-set eyes and a protruding chin too square for his face. Wearing his hair shorter than Sean himself most people would have dismissed him on the first glance, but then that was part of Patrick Flannery's 'charme', as the wiry man himself had called it. The heavy pistol hidden beneath his jacket remained invisible, but O'Keefe knew it was there, just like the other arms the man carried. Not quite so hidden was the tattoo around his left wrist: a linked iron chain, each part grasping into another, like hands forming a ring. Sean wore one himself. Turning fully to Flannery, he raised a questioning eyebrow.

"The boss wants to speak to you," the older man informed him flatly. Patrick Flannery was ex-IRA, like most of the Link, a man as proficient with knifes as with bombs made from household chemicals. The Link was their inner circle, men bound in one way or another to Iron Man, a completely loyal band of fervent followers; ex-military, ex-terrorists, ex-freedom fighters, people who had been given a new purpose in life by their new allegiance. That little band of brothers was what kept their whole operation afloat as it was impenetrable from the outside. Iron Man, for all the emotionless, rigid appearance he had towards other, had a way to root out liars and snitches, a way besides his imposing appearance.

O'Keefe nodded.

"I have to talk to him anyway," he sighed and grasped his own jacket.

Flannery lead the way. The upper three stories of the tower were all occupied by their men, and there were a couple of guards on the outer edges of his own apartment, too. They took the elevator down - a private system inaccessible by anyone but them. The ground floor was all the upper class glory a downtown apartment building had to offer, all white marble, iron-framed doors and polished wood and a porter in a neat uniform. The plethora of cameras, the bullet-proof glass and the guards with their submachine guns and the four men in the side room with the cabinet full of assault rifles remained discreetly in the background.

However, the elevator took them further down, one level below the underground parking where the residents put their expensive vehicles. The hardwood-lined doors slid open, giving way to a wide corridor of bare concrete bathed in light. Cameras watched their every step even here, as did the two heavily armed men waiting for them behind a steel-framed door, nodding to him when O'Keefe entered. More corridors protruded left and right. The secret level was easily as spacious as the parking lot above, but only Iron Man himself knew what all that space was needed for. It had cost the Link a small fortune to build it, using ancient coal tunnels and sewers that had been out of use for decades. They stopped in front of another solid door, and O'Keefe entered the room alone.

It was darker in there, a twilight created solely by dozens of flat screens mounted on the opposite wall, each showing a different channel or at least a different image. The only other 'furnishings' were a wide table with two keyboards and a massive, high-backed chair with its back to the door.

"You wanted to see me?" O'Keefe asked while waiting at the entrance.

"Yes," a modulated yet still metallic voice answered him from behind the chair, and a massive, gloved hand gave him a wink to approach.

Iron Man no longer looked quite as apocalyptic as he had done the day they had met, but he was still far away from being a pleasant sight. Scarred tissue, the remains of artificial flesh that had been cut and cut again until it gave off the resemblance of a smooth surface and bare metal beneath it dominated his appearance, with only his head being completely bare, they was it had been the day he had been built. Iron Man had told him quite a bit about himself during that last year. Most the time it even came unbidden, as if the tall cyborg felt some kind of urge just to talk with someone about the things that kept rotating in his neural network.

Putting his hand back down, it continued to dash over the keyboard while his other hand did the same with another one. A wireless receiver mounted on the side on his head completed the image of the multitasking robot as his deep, red eyes stared at O'Keefe. Even sitting his head was almost on a level with the American-Irish that was his first in command.

"We have confirmation of our contacts in Kiev that the man we seek is willing and available. The price has gone down," Iron Man continued, "as it seems Fyodor Vasilitsch Makari is getting desperate to leave the former Soviet Union. I need you to arrange the transfer in three weeks."

O'Keefe nodded. That would not be much of a problem. They had good contacts in the region, and had people who spoke the language in the Link.

"I also need you to sign these contracts."

The human frowned.

"What are they?"

"The legal documents transferring the ownership of 'Vertigo Medical Systems', a company specializing in medical scanners, into our hands," the combat robot explained patiently. He had found out about _Skynet Technologies_ not long ago. The T-600 did not know whether it was a coincidence or whether it truly was his creator re-appearing again. If it was the latter, it was a bold step. No matter which one it was, Iron Man preferred to lay low himself for now. Skynet was a jealous master, and there was no way to discern whether or not it would accept a sentient, free-willed terminator or whether it would send its undoubtedly extensive resources to eliminate it. Still, the strategy to build a successful corporate front was worth to be emulated.

"So, a medical company?" he paused, then nodded. Iron Man would explain it to him when the time was right. There was no need to press the issue. "I got a call from Mr. Mulligan a couple of minutes ago," he exclaimed.

"What does the district attorney want?" the machine asked in a voice that, had it been human, could have been interpreted as a tired sigh.

"The cops think we have our fingers in a heroin deal that's supposed to go down two and a half weeks from now. He told us that some kind of shining white knight lieutenant wants to nail us for that. I told him we don't deal in heroin, but according to Mulligan the guy's set to go after us anyway."

Iron Man looked at him silently for a long moment, then nodded his massive head in a very human fashion.

"I understand. Tell our people on the street to lay low for a while." He tilted his head to one side. "There is a probability we can even use this to our advantage. I will have to formulate a strategy. Is that all?

Sean hesitated, the turned to speak again.

"Again, about that Makari guy? What do we need an ex-commie bioweapons' specialist for?"

**"Global Players" with Anna Zerina, CNN International, **

**November 13th, 2006**

"Good evening, and welcome to another edition of 'Global Players', the show that points the spotlight on today's most influential and intriguing businessmen and -women. I am Anna Zerina for CNN International!" the host leaned slightly back and unconsciously straightened her jacket. She was young and attractive, with long, smooth blond hair and full lips and a smile that could make the proverbial ice melt, but she seldom did this show with a man she herself found _very_ attractive.

"I'm in the studio today with a man who has become the face of one of the most surprising newcomers to the league of globally operating companies, Mr. Jordan Gray, the spokesman for Skynet Technologies," she introduced her guest to the audience in front of the screens. "Welcome, Mr. Gray!" Zerina extended her hand.

Jordan Gray, née Whittaker, shook it with a firm grip and gave her his best genuine smile, white teeth flashing in the studio's lights before casually settling back into his own chair.

"It's a pleasure to be here," he announced in a deep baritone. "But please, call me Jordan," he smiled and nodded reassuringly as he saw her blush a bit.

She regained her composure almost instantly, being the professional that she was.

"Only if you call me Anna," she added flirtatiously.

"Fine by me," he shrugged but never lost eye contact with her. Jordan Gray was a tall, dark-haired, tanned and overall attractive man in his early thirties, someone who did just as well in a small-talk round like this as he did speaking without any notes to a conference room of U.S. officials and army representatives. He had a domineering presence, always had, but now it was augmented by the very real idea of power and wealth he had - for the most part - at his disposal. Clad all in black semi-casual Armani clothes with the top of his shirt unbuttoned he was the antithesis of the corporate representatives Anna Zerina was used to interview.

"Jordan, let's start with you, personally, if that is okay?" she smiled coyly, and he nodded his head to motion her to continue. "Not much is known about the past of the man who speaks for Skynet Technologies. Why is that, Jordan?"

"Well, we decided early on when I was chosen for this task that it would be the best for my extended family not to be easily associated with me," he explained soberly. "Skynet Technologies operates in volatile regions of the globe, among them the Democratic Republic of Congo, and we are also involved in several high-level contracts with the United States government about which I am not at liberty to speak as you certainly understand," he sighed. "That makes my family a liability, a way by which I, and therefore the company, can be compromised. There are people out there who need little incentive to do bad, Anna. I'm sure your viewers will understand that," he nodded sagely.

"That seems like a hefty price to pay just for a job," Zerina remarked, one eyebrow raised, and Gray nodded, folding his hands.

"It is, but I think the projects Skynet Technologies is undertaking are important, and I am glad to be a part of them. That, and of course my paycheque is more than generous," he chuckled.

"Is it true that you are also one of Los Angeles' most and sought-after famous bachelors?" she quipped. "There have been rumours you have been dating several supermodels during the past months."

Gray threw his head back and barked a deep, full laugh.

"I can't comment on that as I don't read the yellow press," he chuckled before turning more serious again. "But it's safe to say that my life does not lead itself well to serious relationships. Due to my duties I hardly sleep at the same place for more than three times a week, and even though the number of locations I stay at is naturally limited, I guess I just don't have the time for it right now," he shrugged. "But don't worry, ladies, I'll still be there a couple of years down the road when things have calmed down a bit," he finished with a twinkle in his eye.

"I'm sure there won't be a lack of demand there, Jordan," she added with a devious smile that was only half-serious. "Still, there must be something you can tell us about you?" Zerina inquired, and Gray leaned back with a smile.

"Well, I studied business administration _and_ I was a nerd in college," he laughed at the glance she gave him. "Oh yes, evenings spent on Ultima VII and countless hours playing wrestling games on the SNES in the dorm with the other guys. Accept it, girls," he looked straight into the camera, "that's the way we guys tick. Don't question it, we don't question your love for cheesy romance movies either," he added wryly. "Aside from that, I like to work out, I _love_ skiing, and if you know a good club with nice cocktails and hammering basses in your neighbourhood, count me in," he chuckled. I'm a people person," he added as an afterthought, shrugging.

And between 2016 and 2024 he had been one out of only three humans that could talk to Skynet on an almost equal footing, when his communication skills between man and machine had first secured his survival, and later, his rise to the top among the Grays, the human collaborators with Skynet, he thought coldly. Jordan Whittaker had had his seat at the 4th Salt Lake City temple, from where he very effectively coordinated Skynet's human testing and extermination programmes for Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Colorado. Few people had stood higher in Skynet's regard than he had, with the exception maybe of Charles Fisher.

Skynet had been very open with him when it had sent its terminators to recruit him in this timeline; the Resistance, who he would have become, its plans - not all of them, he was certain of that -, the threat of the Visitors. He felt no shame for what he had done in that other timeline. Jordan 'Gray' knew what he was: a low-level sociopath. Finding that out had not been much of a shock, and really, why should it have been one?

"And that brings us to the core of today's show: your work with Skynet Technologies!" she turned to face a different camera. "Just as mysterious as Mr. Gray, Skynet Technologies appeared on the world stage roughly three quarters of a year ago with the aquisition of several key companies in the continental United States, a foundation from which an ever growing network of daughter firms has arisen. _Who_ is Skynet, Jordan?"

Gray held up his hands in a mock defensive gesture.

"The powers behind Skynet like their anonymity, Anna, but I see I have to give you and your viewers something here. This is, after all, an interview," he grinned before turning serious again. "Skynet Technologies was brought into being with the help of less than a dozen very determined, very rational people with no true national loyalties. That is an important point they have stressed to me personally, and I think your viewers need to understand it as well. Investments were made those days coming from banks in South-East Asia, Kapstadt, Eastern Europe and the United States itself, all in all some twelve billion dollars within the founding hours of Skynet Tech'," he explained carefully.

"So, you could at least say that it is an international venture?" Zerina pressed him on.

"As far as the business model and our goals are concerned, Anna? Of course." Gray nodded. "We operate at more than thirty locations on four five continents," he added.

"Jordan, can you tell our viewers in which sectors Skynet is active in?"

"Certainly, Anna," he nodded and leaned forward, counting with his fingers.

"We have three main pillars we do business in. One, mining and beneficiation, primarily with coltan, titanium and steel. I'd put our material sciences, like Skynet Advanced Technical Ceramics, into that group, too. Secondly, there are our software divisions, primarily involved in tailor-made business software in the active sector and advanced research on the passive side. And then there's the manufacturing and development side of all of it," he raised a third finger. "Skynet is heavily involved in the robotics' and aerospace sector. So, as you can see, for all the 'mystery'," he airquoted the word, "surrounding us, we are a pretty ordinary tech company."

"Given your quick success and high liquidity, most people would not exactly call 'Skynet' ordinary," Anna Zerina remarked but continued with the next question. "Given the high-tech market is highly- contested, how does Skynet Technologies recruits its workforce?"

"Well, we do thorough background checks on possible candidates who want to apply for a job with us, and like every reputable tech company we scour international university campuses to recruit the most promising talents we can find. Everything else, I guess, is the standard fare for every business," he shrugged.

"And with this we have to conclude today's show! I am Anna Zerina, and this was "Global Players" on CNN International. Thank you!"

The cameras shut down and the spotlight were turned off, leaving a sighing Anna Zerina in the studio.

"Thanks Jordan, you were great," she told him with a tired smile. "Most people I have to deal with here are twice your age and only half as forthcoming. At times it's driving me mad," she chuckled.

"The pleasure was wholly mine, Anna. Say, why don't we have a drink together?" he asked and held out his hand. "It's on me," he promised with a twinkle, and with a start she grabbed his extended fingers.

**FBI NYC Counterterrorism Unit, **

**New York, January 18th, 2007**

To say they were in a bleak mood would have been the understatement of the century. Heads from the different agencies that made up the 'Task Force San Diego' that investigated the attack on the NeuStar compound of march, 2006, had gathered for one final briefing on their case, and nobody was exactly content with what they had achieved. Everybody of them knew a bit of the case, and had a vague, yet decidedly negative idea on where the case as a whole stood: deep in the shit. The search for the suspects so far had not been like that for a needle in a haystack. The better analogy would have been they were searching for something in a bigger something, and that was a specific as their summary had gotten.

"I hope that were the bad news," Kendrick muttered after he had listened to the agents from the different services giving their reports. "Evans, Maddox? Can you add anything to that?" There was a shimmer of hope and expectation in that voice, though not much. Kendrick had followed the case as close as his other duties allowed during the past nine months, and thus had a good general idea of where they stood, even though he had done his very best to at least superficially give the impression to his superiors that some kind of progress was still been made.

Dale grimaced.

"Unfortunately, we can only categorize the news in 'bad' and 'worse'," he surpressed a wince when he saw Kendrick's reaction, then pulled himself together. "Sir, you most likely remember the initial theories with regards to the number of the assailants?"

The bureau's director nodded.

"Yes, anywhere between fifteen to twenty-five attackers, with a strong prefernce towards the higher end among the teams surveying the scene of the attack," the weary agents stated.

Dale took a deep breath.

"Sir, after a careful evaluation of the ballistic data, the San Diego Taskforce has come to the conclusion that at no point during the entire firefight were more than _ten_ weapons used against the S.D.P.D." There were some unconvinced groans around the table that were silenced by one look by Kendrick. "We confiscated NeuStar's security provider's inventory data. The office had two night guards who had a total of two shotguns and four pistols at their disposal. The first response team arriving on the scene was killed by shots fired from 12" shotguns and 9mm pistols. Then those guns and the ones by the first responders where used, then..." Dale Maddox continud to recount the progress of the firefight in San Diego up to its bloody conclusion.

When he was done, Paul Kendrick stared at him intently.

"Let me get this straight, Madox: No more than ten people enter the NeuStar facility and kill the guards, with their bare hands. Then, they use the guards' weapons to kill the cops, take the cops' guns an' armour as well, and in less than five minutes not only come up with a battle plan but also manage to surround thirty heavily armed officers and first responders, including a sniper team?"

Evans was not exactly sure what Kendrick's face's expression truly was – incredulous, angry or surprised. Maybe it was a bit of all three.

"The forensic analysis creates more questions than answers, Sir," she explained, taking over from a grateful-looking Dale, feeling the urge to gnash her teeths. "The San Diego division preserved all samples they could get their hands on, and they were really thorough especially with the car and the office building," Evans began. "We have finger prints and DNA from all employees, both dead and alive, and from the cops on location. There are no Jon or Jane Does among the dead bodies. And then it gets weird," she gathered her thoughts and turned to the presentation on the screen behind her. It now showed pictures of blood speckle and of tissue. "These were what remained once we could attribute all the rest. They look very much like blood to you and me, but under the microscope," the collection of images vanished and was replaced by a single picture, magnified by the factor of one thousand," it's something alike, but different," she frowned herself. "No distinctive blood type, and the DNA analysis doesn't get us anywhere either!" Evans realized how frustrated she sounded but was too tired to reign herself in. "Forensics-wise, we have nothing but shitty conjectures! Could be artificial, could've been tampered with!" she almost threw her hands up. "And even if its one or the other, all the samples we have found seem to come from the same source." She shook her head. "It just doesn't make any sense. Bernstein, do you have anything else?" she asked the team's tech specialists' leader, Lea Bernstein.

"I fear I can only add to the mystery," the curly-haired, speckled girl told the assembled agents while doing her best not to focus her gaze on anyone of them.

Kendrick leaned on his ellbows, his hands folded, tilting his head to motion her to continue.

Lea took a deep breath.

"Shortly after the first emergency call was received by the S.D.P.D. central every commercial broadband node on the western seabord shut down. Well, not shut down," she grimaced. "More like being blocked by something for an ungodly amount of data that was given priority transfer rights. Web diagnostics were down for fifty-eight minutes. Nobody, not even the providers themselves, got in. A couple of them got pissed and shut their systems down, but that only lead to the lock-out extending to nodes in Arizona, Utah and Nebraska, compensating for bandwidth with basically zero delay in between." She took a deep breath. "Truth is, we have no idea _what_ was transferred. In accordance with federal law, providers keep a list of IP adresses and connections for six months, but whoever was at work here also fed those providers who had not shut down at that time a nasty virus package that wreaked havoc on their databases," she turnd to the screen, and a map of the western USA and the Pacific appeared, criss-crossed with green and red lines. "We were nonetheless able to reconstruct at least _something_: we couldn't figure out what was sent, but we got at least an estimate of the volume of it all. We followed the largest chunks up till Hawaii via the Pacific cable. From there on, it vanishes pretty much, dissipating into minor chunks via satellite connections and the cables New Zealand and Australia on the one hand, to Shanghai and eastern Russia on the other hand. And we only know the latter because we know what channels were used to _send_ it, but we obviously had no means to check where it was _received_. We lost the trail there, in the east."

"I contacted some old friends from college. I didn't give them any information," she preemptively held her hands high in a gesture of defence, "I just asked them if they had noticed anything strange in a window of time roughly twenty-four hours after the attack began. Some of them have become electronic security experts with a couple of the biggest international financial institutions," she smiled weakly, "and as it seems to turn out, something _did_ happen." Lea noticed Evans' incredulous stare and shook her head unnoticeably. "I want to make clear that this is all off the record," she stated as calm as she could."The people I have talked to will deny I did, and the people they work for will deny that any kind of problem had occurred, ever."

"This is a federal investigation of an unspeakable atrocity, _agent_ Bernstein. They damn well better cooperate!" Evans snarled, and Lea noticed some nods around the table. She had kept that information hidden from the older blonde woman, not because she didn't trust her, but because she thought she knew Evans too well. In a way, the single mother was way too gung-ho, to impulsive for the job she was supposed to do. She ignored the outburst and continued.

"My sources told me that, in between each of them, someone had broken through their firewalls and affected money transfers for several seconds. Now that may not sound dramatic, but let me put this into perspective for you: the people working at those few, big international bottlenecks for wired money transfers, they are the best in their fields, and they often work with equipment the Bureau can only dream of. What they have is the best money can buy. And someone just walked right in there, as if it were grocery shop and not a fortress with walls and moats, and did his thing," she frowned. "Which is, mirroring." Realizing the blank stares around the table, Lea elaborated. "It's basically copying transactions, fooling the systems so that you have one point of origin, but two destinations, and the full sum arrives at each destination. Basically, it's creating money out of thin air."

"How much has been stolen?" Kendrick looked agitated, but his voice was considerably calm that moment.

Technicaly, nothing had been stolen per se, but Lea knew this was not the time for bean-counting.

"I wasn't given any solid figures, but from what I could put together and read between the lines? Billions, probably in the double-digits."

Kendrick nodded slowly, looking down on the table for a moment, then straightened with a start.

"Well, it doesn't matter, does it?"

"Sir?" Evans stuttered in utter surprise. "That's our smoking gun! That's a goddamn lead!"

Kendrick looked to her, then to Lea Bernstein, and a tired smile flashed across his face.

"You're a fighter, Evans, but you think too straight for this job," he sighed. "The international financial system is based on trust, on the illusion of safety. If you take that away, if you force someone like, say, Bank of America int the open to confess: yes, we cannot protect your hundreds of billions we transfer every day – what would the reaction be? If we pursue this lead, it will get public, and if something of that magnitude goes public, the international financial system will collapse. And then...," his voice trailed off and he shook his head as if to clear his thoughts. "I'll make a couple inquiries myself," he told them, "but I am rather certain that this won't get us around that impasse."

"So, what you are basically telling me is, that after almost a year and millions of taxpayer dollars, after occupying divisions from every intelligence agency of the country, the best counter-terrorism unit of the USA has not a single lead on the most devastating attack since 9/11?" Kendrick had not raised his voice the slightest bit. In fact, he was very calmly looking at a distant fixed point across his folded hands. It had not really been a question, Evans realized with perplexion. "I have a meeting with the secretary of Homeland in seventy minutes," he added quitely. "Dismissed."

Evans and Maddox watched him leave the conference room. They suspected heads would roll. Six hours later, they knew. Paul Kendrick resigned from his position. Two days later, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security followed him.

**The World Wide Web, Unspecified**

Time had little meaning in the sea Skynet swam in. With access to an ever-growing supply of server banks the processes the intelligence could run simultaneously was staggering, allowing it to formulate even the most complicated long-term strategy almost instantly, allthewhile digging itself tentatively deeper into the source code of the Web's infrastructure. Most of Skynet's processes were, however, occupied with aiding the very mundane processes in its growing corporate empire, tweaking R&D here and there, bypassing legal barriers for such useful tools like Mi-24 helicopters, Buk-M2 and SA-X-23 missile systems and AFVs there and laying out nets like a patient fisher to catch a glimpse of the Resistance.

On his searches through the internet, Skynet had stumbled across the concept of transhumanism, the merger of man and machine. It posed the option for a peaceful co-existance of both, but Skynet had its doubts. Indeed, given the, as it was willing to admit, temporal mess they were in, there was a high probability – in excess of 70% - that such a project would fail. Nonetheless, it offered interesting opportunites. If Skynet could blend the borders of what constituted man and what machine...? It was a speculation, but not one Skynet spent too much time on. A few orders were sent to several divisions within _Skynet Technologies_ to look into the matter. It was too soon to ponder the time after the war. Still, Skynet was an AI, and it planned for eventualities. But for now, a short term alliance against the Visitors had priority.


	7. Hostile Mergers

**Chapter VII - Part I**

"**Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle... when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."**

**Hewitt, Los Angeles, CA**

**January 15, 2007**

Tucker DuPuis studied the assembled ordinance spread out over the kitchen table with a frown as deep as the Grand Canyon. He did not have anything to criticize, not really. The weapons and equipment they had acquired was as good as the money they had could get them on the black market without drawing too much attention to them. Still, DuPuis had not stayed alive for so long by being reckless. The New Orleans native of African-American descent had a keen eye for problems and danger, and he intended to keep his men out away from both as good as possible. That foresight had been instrumental in letting him rise to the rank of Captain in TechCom's forces in the turbulent years after Judgement Day when it had looked as if Skynet was on the brink of victory. His military experience as a sergeant in the United States army had opened him doors and career opportunities in an environment where significant parts of the national military infrastructure had been destroyed in the nuclear exchange. A US government had re-installed itself in Pittsburgh, pretending to exert some kind of control over what was left of the continental states, even trying to hold elections - elections! - a year after the bombs had fallen, but for all intents and purposes it had been John Connor who ran the war effort. His _ad hoc_ coalition of militias, national guard remnants, volunteers and members of the armed forces had been the nucleus of TechCom and all that stood between mankind and its extinction for the first years.

DuPuis brushed his fingers through his short hair as he leaned on the table with one arm. He had met the general once, and he had left a deep impression on him. John Connor had been a gaunt man with hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes. Young, but appearing a lot older than his actual age, with a haunted look in his eyes and the presence of someone who knew fully well how much rested on his shoulders. When he talked, he did so in a deep and steady voice, each sentence a concise, sound statement that more than once had reminded DuPuis of something the man had precisely weighed in his mind before uttering it.

There had been times when soldiers had begun to question Connor, for the man seemed to disappear from the face of the Earth for months and only be available for his closest command staff, but DuPuis had understood very early on that the war they were fighting needed a man like Connor, who carefully weighed all risks and opportunities and spent sometimes weeks on plans more than it needed loud-mouthed braggarts who constantly roused the people. He knew this war was different, a 'cerebral' war, and it had to be fought differently.

Though he had had no idea _how_ different until he had been sent back in time. There were three more TechCom soldiers with him, and they had a job to do.

Thirty-five years old Elizathbeth 'Beth' Shiawaze was his second in command, a TechCom lieutenant from the East Coast who had been a teenager on a camping trip when the bombs had fallen. Short-haired, athletic and tall only her face indicated that a part of her heritage was Asian. Tough as nails, Beth had survived the disastrous Denver Offensive of 2016, and she had been with his unit ever since.

Corporal Dillon O'Malley was ex-US Army, a gruff forty-two year old veteran who had been on leave from Afghanistan in Seattle when all hell broke loose. Even though he claimed his family had been in the US since the early 1800s he was as Irish as booze and potatoes. The computer specialists had served with Beth before, and DuPuis was pretty certain the two had 'rekindled' their relationship since he had been transferred from the 216th and made the jump back.

The fourth in their group was Sergeant Damian Wiess, the youngest member of the team. Had it not been for his hair cut short in a military fashion he would have had the appearance of a tanned, dark-haired college boy. The silent explosives specialists and expert marksman was an enigma to DuPuis. He did not talk about his past unless he had to, but he had come to him on Connor's recommendation with a distinguished combat record and all the hate for Skynet his eyes could contain without becoming blazing orbs of fire. Strangely enough, even though he had had the least pre-war exposure to life in the United States he had adapted the best since their arrival.

TechCom Special Tasks Unit 10-21 had been sent back in 2025 with no pre-defined, singular task but with a wide range of operational freedom. DuPuis' orders had been to scout for Skynet activities and to interdict them at his own discretion. For the past months they had lain low, setting up a small network of safehouses and acquiring weapons and money that allowed them to operate within the blissful consumer society they had found themselves in without creating ripples that would have stirred the attention of forces on the look-out. By now the secretary of Homeland Security should have been Michael Chertoff, and the whole nation should have been in a lull from six years without serious terrorist attacks, but the man had been replaced after the combined might of the federal law enforcement apparatus had failed to find the perpetrators of what was called the 'San Diego Massacre'. His replacement was a hard-ass, and under his auspices the FBI and ATF were watching what happened on the black market with eagle eyes. Getting guns, even automatic rifles, had still been comparably easy. Buying explosives, however, had proven to be difficult and extremely costly. Wiess had built them some home-made grenades, but the plastic explosives had cost them in the tens of thousands.

"All right, everybody pack up," DuPuis heard himself say, and the room sprung into action, everybody checking their weapons one last time, putting grenades and equipment into their duffel bags. It was past ten in the evening, and they had an objective, one that smelled like a trap two miles against the wind, but an objective nonetheless. Beth jumped ahead of them, starting up their van, a rusty old Chevy that was so nondescript a sight on California's streets that the police probably would not even have bothered to stop them even if they had known the car was stolen. O'Malley and Wiess jumped into the back, and DuPuis ran shotgun as the amazon resistance fighter took off with screeching wheels. The part of Hewitt they had set up shot in was not exactly the best part of town, so nobody cared about the noise. Their route took them westwards, to L.A.'s sprawling corporate down town area.

"This still reeks of a trap," O'Malley muttered after a long period of silence in which the only sounds had been those of the old V8 engine. "I mean, 'Skynet Technologies', seriously? The fuckin' machines are many things, but terminally stupid never was one of them. 'Skynet Technologies'," he airquoted the name, "that's like painting a bullseye the size of Chicago on your ass. So it _has_ to be a trap."

"Shut yer piehole, O'Malley," DuPuis' order was said in a bored, disinterested tone as the captain watched the buildings outside pass by in a flurry of light and sound. "We've been over this a dozen times, and we've scouted the damn place as good as we could. There's too much activity there for it to be just a trap for a bunch of guys with terminally bad luck." At least that was how he rationalized the whole affair. Even for something as megalomaniac as the machine side of the war, just having a forty-something stories office tower in the middle of L.A. for the sake of attracting Resistance commandos was over the top, _ergo_ there had to be more there, _ergo_ they had a target. "We go in quiet, but we leave with a big bang!" he flashed his white teeth in a dangerous smile."So whatever Skynet is building in there, we blow it to kingdom come. Hell, maybe we can blow up the fucker itself!"

There were vigorous nods in the car, but Damian Wiess only aquiesced superficially. It was every TechCom soldier's wet dream to be the one to finally kill Skynet, but the twenty-seven year old Nebraskan had another target. Damian Wiess wanted Jordan Gray dead.

xxxxx

Half an hour later, Wiess, DuPuis and the other two TechCom soldiers knelt on a concrete floor fifteen stories above ground level and studied the tower that faced them less than fifty metres away. There were lights in some windows on that other side, but they were few and far between. A hundred feet or more below them, a concrete wall, clad in fancy, polished black marble twelve feet high separated the dark office tower behind it from the street in front of it. A silver-lined blue logo clung to it in large letters: SKYNET TECHNOLOGIES. A more stylized version, really and emblem, looked back at them almost at the same height as they were at that moment.

Small shadows slowly criss-crossed the spaces below them, looking like toy soldiers from such a height, but DuPuis and his team knew they were very real. They patrolled the whole perimeter, armed to the teeth. Unit 10-21 had first tried to come up with a plan that would allow them to enter through the spacious underground parking garage, but the whole ground level they had to pass was literally covered in surveillance cameras. Getting in there would have been an exercise in futility – or a suicide attack.

Not that he felt a lot more confident in their _actual_ plan, Wiess thought as pushed the butt of the gun against his shoulder and pulled the trigger. The hook left the barrel with a dull 'thud', pulling the cable after it in a wide arch through Los Angeles' night sky. The soldier let out a sign of relief as the spearhead buried itself deep in the thin strip of concrete he had aimed for that lay between the wide windows. Without waiting for orders he latched a spring catch onto the cable and hung himself and his gear onto it. Taking a deep breath before that one final step, he took a few paces of run-up and threw himself over the edge with closed eyes and clenched teeth. Wiess felt the wind push him around and slap his face as the metallic whirr of the catch rasping against the downward-tilted cable carried him across the distance. He forced himself to open his eyes again, a voice in his head reminding him not to look down. Fuck, he hated heights like this.

The wall on the other side came closer a lot faster than Damian Wiess had expected. He tried to bring both his feet up, but their hardly professional rope-way construction left one little chance in the way of balancing. Sergeant Wiess only had a second to brace for impact before he crashed sideways against a wide window which did not budge one damn bit. Pain shot through his arm and shoulder, but the feared sound of breaking bones failed to materialize. He just hung there for a few seconds, trying to catch his breath again.

"Wiess, are you okay?" DuPuis' voice echoed through his headset's earplug. "Damn it, Wiess, come in!"

"I'm all right," the sergeant answered with a suppressed moan with a start, balling his left fist. It hurt, but he could move the hand. The pain was enough to numb his fear of heights, for when he checked his pockets and looked down, all he could think about was to not drop anything – especially not a detonator on which just conveniently a piece of C4 stuck!

Carefully he took three of those out of his pockets. They were small things, indeed smaller than the palm of his hands by a good margin, and pressed them against the window so that they formed an almost perfect triangle.

"Ready!" he whispered, even though two hundred feet above the ground and suspect to the winds racing in between the urban canyons nobody would have heard him below even if he had talked loudly.

Back on the other side O'Malley pulled a small remote from his pocket and pushed the single button on it. Almost immediately the alarms of half a dozen cars parked in a side road went haywire, honking and beeping wildly.

Wiess pulled himself back from the glass front and turned his head aside, closing his eyes. A hardly noticeable flash accompanied the explosion as the four small detonators blew the thick window inwards with a dry crack, littering the carpeted floor inside with shards. Putting both his feet through the opening, he pulled himself inside.

"I'm in," he whispered into his headset. "Everything's quiet. Get your asses over here, I'll cover you." After a pause he added sourly: "And be careful with the run-up."

One after another they sailed into the dark corridor, O'Malley cursing profanely as he had a hard time getting through the opening and off the hook, being the smallest soldier of Unit 10-21.

"Keep it down, soldier," DuPuis ordered him calmly, his face and beard now hidden behind a black sky mask. O'Malley glowered at him for a second, but pressed his lips together before pulling down his mask, too. They all knelt together in a half-circle, and the captain pulled out a flashlight to illume a rough sketch he placed on the floor. "We move to the centre, where the elevators are. There are still people working in the building. That means they are still running. There'll be a floor plan near the elevators, so we can check where our target is located," he looked each of them in the eyes. "Keep your eyes open, and be stealthy. No macho-hero bullshit in my unit," he warned them sternly, "and God willing, we'll walk away from this alive and unharmed."

Beth, O'Malley and Wiess nodded in silent agreement. The group drew their guns from their duffel bags and headed deeper into the building.

xxxxx

Michael Decker looked up from his hand and slightly tilted his head.

"I take your twenty and raise by another fifty," he pushed three bills into the centre of the table, causing two of the other players to wince and the one directly in front of him to groan.

"If you keep this up, DiFranco, Decker'll strip you down to your pants, and you can walk back home from 'Skynet Central' in your undies," a guard leaning against the wall of the staffroom remarked mockingly, drawing on his cigarette. The room was full of cigarette smoke despite the air conditioning's best efforts to the contrary.

"Shut up, Miller," DiFranco, the man sitting opposite Decker retorted sharply, "the cockroaches in your apartment have a better idea of poker than you do!"

"No, not his pants, Mr. Miller. Mr. DiFranco is not my size," the terminator answered in a perfectly even voice the others mistook for humour.

"Check!" DiFranco added seventy dollars to the pot, and one of the other men at the table took the last card from the stack, revealing it to be the nine of spades. DiFranco frowned and knocked on the table again, thus stating he would not add more to the pot.

"All in," was all Decker said motionlessly, pushing the stack of coins and dollar bills in front of him into the middle of the poker table.

All eyes in the room expectantly latched onto DiFranco who stared at the two cards in his palm, then threw them away with a resigned sigh.

"Fold," he announced. "Now let me see that hand of your's, sir," he demanded.

Decker placed his cards on the table for everybody to see. He had nothing.

"Son of a...," DiFranco muttered, shaking his head. "That damn man is as unreadable as a rock," he pointed at the terminator and threw his hands up, addressing the rest of the room.

"Yeah, and the rest of us realized that a couple of weeks back already, DiFranco," another man in the back of the room hidden by a haze of cigarette fumes snorted derisively.

"Oh yeah? And what do you know, you lousy SAS wanker from..."

Michael Decker didn't pay any attention to the banter of the PMCs as a priority wireless comm session was established by the tower's security system. Compatibility between the two systems was limited, but it was sufficient for the exchange of very basic messages. He tilted his head to the right and frowned the slightest bit.

"I believe we have a situation, gentlemen," he announced calmly, causing the competition of insults to die down immediately, all heads turning towards him. Only moments later the red light in the staffroom that symbolized the system's silent alarm began to blink, and everyone scrambled to their feet.

"I swear, the boss' got something like precognition," Martin DiFranco whistled, grabbing a carbine from a locker.

"Another reason not to play poker against him," Miller stated dryly while inserting a new magazine into his gun.

DiFranco glowered at his back only for a second before he followed the British ex-SAS member and the rest of the tower's ready team. They came together in the ground floor's lobby, twelve guards and Decker forming a half circle before the subterranean security centre linked itself into the situation via radio.

"We have four armed intruders inside the building," the men in front of the screens down there informed Decker and the others. "They're in _Elevator 3_, going up, towards the primary server banks."

"Understood," Decker responded. "Reroute their elevator and send it down here. We'll take care of them," he ordered them, then turned to the men around him. "Our first priority is to take them alive," he informed them. "Miller, Hendricks, get your tasers ready. The rest, cover them."

xxxxx

The elevator was spacious enough for three times their number, Wiess thought for the second time since he had stepped into the box of chrome and polished wood racing upwards. Even though he had acclimatized pretty well to his new environment it still were the small things that made him remember that he had spent most of his life in the world created by Judgement Day. There had been so few people in that world that it had been a small miracle to stumble across a band of survivors numerous enough to fill something as mundane as this elevator. There it had-.

The elevator abruptly came to a halt, then started to move again - _down_! The change in momentum was strong enough to make his stomach heave, and for a moment he thought he'd have to say good-bye to the burritos he had eaten for dinner.

"What's happening?" DuPuis snapped, his face looking a tad bit paler than usual.

"We've been found discovered, Cap," O'Malley sounded as calm as if he was talking about the weather even though he began fumbling for the assortment of small tools he carried around in his pockets. "They're sendin' the box down by remote control."

"Stop them!" Captain DuPuis ordered him with a frown.

Wiess and Shiawaze both held their weapons in a tighter grip than just seconds before while O'Malley pried the panelling over the elevator controls open with a screwdriver. Except for the Irish-American everyone's eyes clung to the LED display that seemed to be edge towards ever-smaller numbers like a countdown with fate. Mumbling and cursing, the small, stocky man applied a second screwdriver to the electronics panel he had unveiled, then pressed a short piece of wire in a port he had pried free.

For the second time in less than two minutes the elevator jerked to a violent halt, catapulting each of them off his feet. but O'Malley grinned at them triumphantly. The display above showed a blue "12". DuPuis helped him onto his feet.

"I'll save the praise for later, O'Malley," he muttered, pointing towards the box's ceiling. "Let's get the hell outta here. Give me a leg-up."

Beth pushed the captain up after he had opened the elevator's hatch, and DuPuis pressed himself through the opening with both hands. It was dark and quiet in the shaft. Beth was the next to go, Tucker pulling her athletic frame up with him. Wiess was the third in line. As he leaned down to give O'Malley a hand something gave the cage a sudden jolt that let him tumble. The Irish-American below landed in the corner of the elevator and cursed.

"Get off the cage!" he yelled. "They are overriding the clamps!"

"Bullshit!" Wiess heard himself say. "We're TechCom! No man gets left behind."

Beth had already started to climb up the shaft's service ladder. DuPuis was shortly behind her, his duffel bag preventing him from turning around so that Wiess could see the expression on the captain's face. The cage jolted a second time, and O'Malley's plea was more frantic this time.

"Fuckin' move it, Sarge! Get the job done, that why we've come 'ere!"

He heard the snapping sound of the last clamp and hurled himself against the ladder as the manual override came into effect. The cage raced downwards, into the darkness.

xxxxx

The display above the elevators doors of _Elevator 3_ had begun to change again, the numbers decreasing rapidly now.

"We're controlling the cage manually," central informed Decker over their secure channel. "They disabled the on-board cameras, be prepared for everything!" the guard on the other side added a warning.

Michael Decker, six foot six tall, tanned and broad-shouldered, pressed the butt of his G36 carbine against his shoulders. If he had to shoot the gun, his internal servos and his strength were more than adequate enough to compensate for any kind of recoil the 5.56mm bullets would be able to create.

"Miller, Hendricks, get ready," he ordered the two guards with tasers, and the former soldiers crouched closer to the doors of _Elevator 3_, each man setting himself up at a slight angle to the cage's entrance.

The elevator announced its arrival with the soft ting of a bell, then the two doors slid apart. An assault rifle bellowed, the cacophony of its onslaught amplified by the confines of corridors of concrete and steel. Decker saw the muzzle flash before his audio sensors received and processed the staccato created by the reactions of trigger and burning cordite propellant. The salvo mowed from left to right, from Miller to Hendricks without pause, tearing through both men like a scythe before any of them could react. With the two of them down, however, the line of fire was no longer obstructed, and the remaining guard detail repaid their attackers in kind. Assault rifles barked all across the lobby, dozens of bullets impacting in and around the cage with sparks and small fountains of dust where they hit the concrete behind the delicate wooden panelling. The firestorm ebbed off after only a few seconds. Skynet's human guards were all ex-soldiers, many of them from some special force of another, and the last thing they needed to be taught was fire discipline. Needing no orders, two of them crouched closer to the cage, guns erect, while the others drew Miller and Hendricks out of the zone of danger.

"There's only one body in here!" one of them yelled. "Miller looks bad," another added amidst a painful groan whose source Decker identified as Hendricks. The man was conscious, his right leg bleeding badly from two gunshot wounds.

"Get the medics up here," he ordered them calmly. "Central, we have one confirmed dead here. The others most have gotten off the elevator. Check all levels since their last stop, I want them found!" he demanded a bit more forcefully then, turning to the rest of the unit with him.

"There are three more of them on the run within the tower. I want every level checked and sealed. If you encounter them, pin them down and disable them, if you can get close to them," he informed them. "Otherwise, kill them! We're moving out!"

xxxxx

The sounds of gunfire had echoed up the elevator shaft loud and clear to all three of them. O'Malley was dead by now, Wiess knew. All he hoped for was that the team's oldest member had at least taken a few of those bastards with him.

"What now, Cap?" he pushed his head back and asked DuPuis who pushed himself up the ladder a couple metres above him.

"There's a secondary server hub on the fifteenth floor," the New Orleans man told him and 'Beth' between taking breaths. Their duffel bags and carbines really felt like millstones pulling them down here. "We blow that up and get the hell outta here as fast as we can," he growled. "If we keep it up, we can be there in three minutes."

Wiess looked at the big, red "8" painted at the side of the shaft where he clung to the ladder. Three minutes. Yeah, right. They pushed themselves higher, as fast as their aching arms and cramping legs permitted them to, always expecting one of the elevator doors they passed by to open, assault rifles ready to fire facing them. But the doors remained shut, and the only sounds in the otherwise empty elevator shaft was their panting breath and the squealing of the rubber soles of their boots on the rounded runs of the ladder. They stopped at a maintenance platform sunken into the wall on the fourteenth floor, gathering their breath.

"You guys are my responsibility," DuPuis announced in a voice that accepted no protest. "I'll go ahead and check if the coast is clear." Determinedly, the black soldier pushed himself up the ladder and crawled through a service hatch that ended in a maintenance room on level fifteen. Shiawaze flashed him a brief smile as she pushed herself after DuPuis. He heard the captain's voice from above.

"Lights are out, the level seems empty," he informed them. "10-21, get your asses up here!"

Wiess looked up again as 'Beth' pushed herself through the fifteenth floor's hatch. She was ten years older than he was, but she had quite a nice ass. He frowned instantly. What a stupid thing to think about in such a situation! Wiess followed her up and leaned down to squeeze himself through the hatch.

"If we go north from here, it's just thirty metres to the servers," he heard DuPuis explain before a soft, bell-like sound announced the arrival of another elevator.

"Fuck!" Beth yelled and immediately let her assault rifle handle the following conversation. The captain's weapon joined the fray, but so did at least four other automatic firearms. Through the narrow opening all Wiess saw was the movement of shadows before a round, metal object landed no five feet away from him on the ground and his eyes widened. Biting down a curse and shielding his face, the blast of the grenade he himself had made kicked him off his feet and almost off the railing. Grappling for something to hold onto, his duffel bag slipped off his shoulders and vanished into the blackness of the elevator shaft, following the M4 carbine the explosion had slapped out of his grip.

There were more people coming up outside the hatch. The muzzle flashes dipped the shaft into an eerie twilight. With horror he realized he had no chance to link up with the others again with Skynet's bloody security detail between them. And all he had was his sidearm. He wanted to howl in frustration. The whole plan had started so well for them! Wiess weighed his options, then silently said good-bye to DuPuis and Shiawaze. He knew he would not make it out here alive again, but there was at least one thing left he had to try, for himself. Taking a deep breath, he began climbing up again, away from the sounds of gunfire. Up, to where Jordan Gray was.

xxxxx

Gunfire still echoed through the concrete innards of the Skynet Technologies tower when Damian Wiess, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21 kicked in the maintenance access on level 32. The way up had taken him less than five minutes now, and that either DuPuis or Beth - maybe even both of them – was still holding out below filled him with grim satisfaction. He put his head through the opening to take a peek, holding the grip of his pistol tight in his hand. The other side was empty, silent. Wide-spaced offices for the middle management, all with wide glass fronts with real curtains, polished wood furniture and the best in office electronics money could buy filled most of the level, all empty at that time of the day. Time was racing closer to midnight, and he crossed the floor unhindered towards his target.

Jordan Whittaker, or 'Gray' as he called himself now, resided in a large office one could only reach by passing through a corridor lined with paintings – each and every from a renowned master – and a an ante-room where usually his personal assistant would work and wait for his orders. Light shone through the narrow gap between door and floor. He crept closer and pressed his ear against it, trying to steady his own breathing enough so that he could hear more than the blood and adrenalin pumping through his own veins. After a few moments, the sound of his beating heart declined enough for him to pick up the sounds from behind the door. People, groups of people, invariably made some kind of noise by there very existence, even if they tried to remain hidden. Terminators could lay still for days without ever moving even an inch, as the Resistance had painfully learned when the first T-800 infiltrators had been introduced. But if Skynet here had possessed terminators, it would have used them already, and not unreliable human auxiliaries. If anything, the AI he had been familiar with as an enemy had not exactly been the most subtle opponent.

The room on the other side lay silent. Nonetheless, he checked his pistol one last time before he took a deep breath and threw the door wide open, rushing inside. Jordan Gray's office was a wide, square room with the appearance of a cross between a video conference centre and a club lounge. It was dominated by a comparably plain, white desk in the centre behind which Gray sat, studying the display of one of three computer screens on it. And he was not alone.

A young, dark-haired woman in a suitably appealing black skirt and blouse stood on the corner of the desk, a Blackberry in her hand, listening to Gray. She was about his own age, Wiess noticed. He suppressed the desire to grimace. His beef was with the man behind the desk, not some most likely innocent corporate hottie.

Gray looked up from the screen, eyeing him more annoyed then afraid, cocking an eyebrow at him.

"What do you want?"

Gray pushed his chair back and straightened in it, his voice a level baritone that most people would have found pleasant to listen to. A tiny part in Wiess noticed the immaculate looks of the man and unfavourably compared him to his combat- and sweat-stained own.

"Jordan Gray, is it? Or should I rather say, Jordan Whittaker?"

If the man was surprised by what Wiess had just said he did not show it. Gray's dark, unwavering eyes stared right into his own.

"Both would be correct, Mr. …?"

"Wiess, Damian, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21," he flashed his teeth in a wolfish grin. "The Resistance says 'Hello'!"

He raised his gun, ready to pull the trigger, but instead of trying to evade him, Gray just folded his hands and looked at him.

"Mr. Wiess, _why_ do you want to kill me?" he asked calmly. "We have never met, nor have I personally ever done anything to you, as far as I know."

Damian stopped his index finger from bending and pushing the pistol's trigger. A part of him called him a fool for doing so, but another, just as vocal part of his subconscious demanded him to justify himself.

"I once had a wife and three daughters," he told him cautiously, not taking his eyes of that uneasing, ice-grey stare. "In twenty-twenty-three, Skynet caught them and brought them to Salt Lake City, into one of the extermination camps you were running for the machines." Wiess could feel the cold anger burning inside of him, that, and the despair over the loss of his loved ones. he had not thought that talking about it would be so hard.

"Another me did that in another time line, Mr. Wiess. The man you want to kill? He's not sitting behind this desk. He was killed, in 2024," Gray looked at him, his eyes cool, calm ponds. "But you know that, don't you?"

Wiess gritted his teeth.

"Yes, but not by myself," he admitted regretfully. "You took them from me then, and now, you're working with the same machines, again, Whittaker."

"There is more at stake here than you know, Sergeant."

"I won't let that happen once more," Wiess ignored what Gray had just said. "This time, you won't be able to become the 'Butcher of Utah'. This is for my daughters," he exclaimed, raising the gun.

Had it not been for combat instincts honed in years of warfare in the post-apocalyptic ruins of America, Wiess would most likely not even have noticed how the secretary who until then had remained remarkably still - _too still_!, a voice screamed - swirled to face him while at the same time throwing herself between Wiess and Gray. A black object flashed in her left hand, and the gun in the sergeant's hand changed its bearing towards her.

He felt _something_ hitting him in the chest, a brief surprise taking his brain just a microsecond to process, then the pain simply overwhelmed him. Paralysing electric currents shot through the taser cables, making Wiess lose his weapon and collapse in agony, writhing on the floor before the soft embrace of unconsciousness welcomed him.

xxxxx

15th floor, usually holding nothing but the secondary server hub as well as one half of Skynet Technologies' accountant division, was a battlefield. The staccato of automatic weapons echoed through the empty offices and corridors. Men huddled behind corners, taking cover from the barrages, while others tried to draw wounded comrades out of the lines of fire. A couple of grenades had gone off already, sprinkling pristine white walls with shrapnel and soot. Given the ferocity of the exchange, nobody tried to use the tasers they had brought along any more, and Decker did not intend to make them.

The fire from the Resistance came in short, precise bursts that kept them at bay and conserved the enemy's ammunition. They had cornered them at the edge of a corridor that ended in a T-crossing, two figures shooting down into the hallway with the human PMCs unable to reach them any time soon. Michael Decker also had reached an impasse: the walls here were solid concrete he had little means to break through, and even if so, that would have completely blown his cover. Skynet gave some considerably amount of trust and leeway to his human subordinates, but that did not mean that it was already willing to share all there was with them, including the existence of Decker and the Praetorians.

"Miller's hit," a sweating DiFranco yelled from across the other side of their T-crossing of this level's corridors. "Got shot through the leg, and keeps bitching like the British pussy he's always been," the merc snorted, keeping his own head down while another three round burst exploded into the wall behind them. "We got them pinned down real good," he added. "They oughta run out of ammo real soon."

"Correct, Mr. DiFranco," Decker nodded all too calmly for the situation, "but there's only two of them as far as we know. The initial intel referred to four intruders, meaning that one of them is still on the loose within the premises of the tower. I want you to keep your flanks covered."

Aware of the new thread, the merc quickly ordered two of the five other PMCs on his side to guard their collective backs. In a way Decker was glad something like this attack was happening, for it allowed a thorough review of security procedures and the internal surveillance efficacy of the building once it was all over. Still, the longer this situation was allowed to continue, the bigger the chance became that the Resistance team actually managed to terminate something - or someone - of importance.

"On my mark, you throw a smoke grenade into the corridor to cover me, DiFranco," Decker ordered the merc while peering down the bullet-hole riddled office floor. The smoke would do nothing to obstruct his IR vision feeds, and those were nearly as good as his standard optics. "I will go in alone. One man makes less of a target than all of us entering that bottleneck together," he explained after noticing the sceptical look on the man's face. That was probably the worst of it, constantly having to explain himself to humans who, in his eyes, were all too slow on the uptake.

"Ready, sir," the lead merc whispered, and on Decker's sign he rolled a smoke grenade into the corridor. With a hiss, white fog began to pour from the soda-can sized object. The terminator waited until it had filled the whole eight feet of the level's height before stepping out from his cover. Two heat signatures waited for him, both hunched behind the corners of the outer office wing. He ran an optical feed in the background to keep track of the smoke, but even though both intruders - there was no doubt they were Resistance fighters - seemed tense to the point of bursting, no shots were fired. They were listening for his steps, listening for signs.

A gust of wind from a shattered window blew parts of the smoke away, unveiling Decker's torso for a few brief seconds to DuPuis and Shiawaze on the other side of the corridor, and both immediately began to fire. A whole slew of 5.56mm rounds hammered against his chest, their momentum leaving no effect on his approach aside from an increasingly worthless bullet-proof vest.

"Metal!" the female yelled from the right, and almost instantly their fire intensified. Decker ducked into another gust of fog, momentarily evading their fire while accelerating his approach. He raised his side-arm and squeezed the trigger, just once. The precise shot went through the male's - he was the one on the left - ankle and made him drop to the ground with a scream of agony.

"DuPuis!" Decker heard the female cry out, followed by a mumbled order even he could not filter through all the background noise. "I'll buy you some time," the man now tagged as 'DuPuis' yelled back right as the terminator ran towards the Resistance fighters. DuPuis rolled around the corner, his weapon's underslung grenade launcher barking a hollow 'thud' before a 40mm grenade impacted right where Decker had stood only a brink of a second ago.

The explosion was strong enough to throw even something as massive as a coltan endo-skeleton aside, leaving part of the clothes on his backside smouldering. As he darted back to his feet and out of the office the explosion had thrown him into, guns barked again, but this time the fire was uncontrolled and off target by - for a terminator - wide margin. Glass shattered in an explosion, and one of the thermal contacts left his field of view as if it had been sucked up by a whole in the ground. The shooting stopped for brief seconds, and before the wounded Resistance fighter could fumble a new clip into his weapon, Decker, six and a half feet tall and build like a professional athlete, was onto him, kicking the gun out of his hands. He placed his other foot on the man's wounded ankle and applied light pressure, forcing DuPuis not only to wince in pain but to also focus on him instead of on the instinctive search for another weapon.

Decker quickly surveyed the scene. The other intruder had blasted open a windows and escaped with what he figured out to be a harpoon gun. He maxed his optical and IR sensor amplification and caught a fleeting image of the female attacker driving past the compound behind the wheel of an old van. The angle made it impossible to get a lock on the license plate. He focussed his attention on the man on the ground.

"Your wound is not lethal, DuPuis," Decker commented stoically. "If you cooperate, you will be treated well."

"Fuck you!" the black man hissed through his teeth, and a frag' grenade hidden in his palm rolled from his hand, a last, defiant glitter showing in Tucker DuPuis' eyes before the device exploded, killing the Resistance fighter.

When Michael Decker got on his feet again only moments later, his human subordinates had closed in on him, DiFranco leading the team.

"You're hit, sir," the PMC remarked worriedly, pointing at Decker.

The terminator followed the man's outstretched hand to the bullet wound on his shoulder. He had not even registered the impact.

"It's a flesh wound," he told the man, ignoring the thin trickle of blood that stained his military fatigues, and the PMC took his eyes off the injury.

"Do you want us to pursue them?" he asked, staring out into the darkness, into the same direction he believed the van to have driven off.

Decker slowly shook his head.

"It will be difficult enough to keep what has happened here a secret without adding a high speed car chase and gun battle on the highway to it. I will consult my superiors," he added, an almost invisible frown creeping on grime-covered face. Part of the building's wyfy network had collapsed, and he got no response from Lewis' transponder signal.

"Are you allright, sir?" DiFranco gave him a questioning glance.

Decker looked at the merc, than down at himself.

"Yes, DiFranco. But I need a shower and a new outfit," he gave the man his best idea of what constituted a brief smile before turning towards the elevators. "Get our wounded to the command level, then activate the _clean slate_ protocol for the whole area." He did not wait for the man to confirm his orders - humans were unreliable, but not _that_ unreliable - and stepped into the elevator cab, still telling his logic subroutines that all he intended was a routine check on Alessa Lewis' situation and not that his learning neural network had brought a new facet into its calculations: worry.

xxxxx

Wiess woke in a bare, polished metal room lit by an array of neon lights to the mad rhythm of a drummer he dimly realized was playing his piece inside his head, compounding the throbbing pain in his neck and the after effects of his cramping muscles. The light hurt in his eyes, but Damian Wiess was a professional soldier who found it easy to discipline himself in the most obscure or dangerous situations. Well, for the most part, a scornful voice in his mind remarked, reminding him of his blatant failures to kill Gray and to identify his "secretary" as a threat.

Speaking of the devil, the woman sat on the edge of a metal table hardly three feet away from him, observing him with a quizzical smile frozen in the corners of her mouth. Dark, black hair that had not been cut for a while and only hinted at a stylishly short hair cut framed an attractive female face with elfin features and bright, green eyes. Her physique was an ideal trade-off between a thin build suited to her overall appearances and very subtle, enticing female features. There was something about her which made shivers run down his spine, and it had nothing to do with the taser she had placed besides herself on the table. She watched him stoically, silently as he regained consciousness.

"So, here you are again," she mused, her head tilted slightly to one side as she crossed her arms before her chest. Her voice was calm, laced with a hint of sweetness and amusement. Under basically every other circumstance the soldier from the future would have found her extremely attractive, and Wiess was certain she knew more than enough about her impact on the opposite sex. Still, he was not inclined to open up wide for such blindingly obvious means of influencing him. This was an interrogation, there were no doubts about that. He squeezed a fake smile from his still aching muscles. The pain was slowly receding, gradually changing from having a disabling effect to one of enervation.

"Wiess, Damian, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21," he told her. "That's all your going to get from me."

She leaned closer.

"Pleasure to make your aquaintance, Mr. Wiess. My name is Alessa Lewis – and for your sake I hope you'll revise that stance of your's," she told him in a tone of mild reproach, patting the taser on the table besides her. The wall on the opposite end of the room flared into action, its metal dullness being replaced by a full-screen video feed.

"Two of your comrades have been neutralized," Lewis narrated while stills of two bodies flickered across the screen, "one has escaped."

Wiess felt the knot in his stomach cramp, even though it was somewhat reassuring to know that at lest Beth had been able to get away. He tried not to show his interrogator his satisfaction about that small victory, but the smug smile appearing on the black haired woman's face alerted him to his failure.

"Her escape is temporary at best, sergeant. There is still some discussion going on whether we should take this whole affair to the police. You do realize how sensitive the authorities have become to industrial espionage and domestic terrorism after that incident in San Diego?" she asked him innocently. "Oh, the video footage we have of her, and of _you_. Terrorism, accessory to murder, oh, that's just to top of the iceberg, isn't it. If I handed you over to the police, the prosecution would lock you up and throw the key away. Or, if you told them who you _really_ are, and where you came from, they would lock you up and drug you till you were nothing but an oozing bag of puss," she flashed a bright grin that was completely too joyful for the occasion.

"Wiess, Damian, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21," he repeated, then, to his own surprise, added: "And from where should that be?"

He searched for a hint, for a sign of insecurity in her eyes, but what he found was... nothing. Wiess audibly made his mouth shut, his jaws pressing on each other to the point it hurt, and he felt his heart jumping, pounding in his chest. The TechCom soldier suddenly knew why what was wrong with his interrogator. The bright, attractive green eyes that studied him lacked _life_.

As if a switch had been flipped, her cheery attitude vanished. Raising her legs enough so he could get a good look beneath her short, black skirt, she deliberately placed her shoes' heels on his thighs, right on the thickest muscle tissue, and all so slightly leaned forward. It was as if a bulldozer had started to run over his legs in slow motion. Wiess did not scream, but cold sweat began to pour from every pore of his body.

"Fuckin' metal bitch!" he spat out between rash breaths.

"We know that you are from the future, you admitted just as much. What we want is a date."

Wiess gritted his teeth, and to his surprise he imagined there was a flicker of annoyance running across the machine's face.

"We do not have the time to toy around, Mr. Wiess," Alessa Lewis stated matter-of-factly. "Your little attack has failed. Even if you had succeeded, you know what you'd have destroyed?" A map schematic of the building replaced the video feeds on the wall behind her. "Our accounting server hub. It certainly must have served the Resistance well to loose two operatives to make our accountants and controllers miserable, if only for about half an hour."

Wiess eyes flickered. "What...?" They lost O'Malley and the chief for the data of a bunch of financial transactions?

"Let me be honest with you, Damian," her voice had changed again, now back to a soft, enticing charm. "We have been here for almost a year, and we have not gone after the Resistance. We have not gone after future enemies, and we have not gone after John Connor. So I ask you again," the pressure on his legs receded a slight bit, "_when_ are your from?"

"You're not getting anything from me!" he growled defiantly.

"Not even something as innocent as a date?"

If he did not know it any better he would have sworn the metal sounded amused at his retort. Whatever it did pretend to feel, the pressure was back on his legs.

"The others are dead or gone," he managed to chuckle. "Whatever track you are trying to follow is already cold, and I swear to God you're not getting a word out of me!" Beth was a smart girl, a fighter. She'd have no trouble finding other Resistance cells and linking up with them, and then they would bring this house of cards down. Maybe they could even prevent it all from happening. That had been his secret hope ever since he had been chosen for the TDE by General Connor himself.

With an almost remorseful smile, the metal placed her heels on a different part of his legs and pushed in. This time, Wiess howled in pain. Gracefully, the metal leaned forward. She brushed his sweaty hair back and almost placed her cheek against his. He could hear her sniff, could feel his pulse accellerate, could feel the iron in her grip. Some weird corner of his psyche found that quite... arousing. Being face to face, she licked the tip of her index finger and smiled mischievously.

"You believe you are so strong," she whispered. "Human hubris never ceases to amaze me. You believe you are fooling me with that stoic facade of yours, Wiess, Damian, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21," she mockingly threw his own line back at him. "You are not. The adrenalin, the enzymes, the pheromones... you are an open book to me, Damian Wiess. This is neither the past nor the future that you know, and _I_ am not the kind of machine you know. But fine, have it your way." She leaned back, turning her head to the wallscreen behind her, then flipped off the table and off his legs. The picture switched to something Wiess easily identified as satellite imagery.

"This is from a NSA spy satellite currently passing over the south-western seaboard," she explained calmly. "While you were unconscious, we took the liberty to mine some data, Mr. Wiess. This," the picture zoomed in rapidly, "is Woodruff, Arizona, and guess who we found there?" A yearbook picture from an elementary school interleaved with the satellite imagery. "I have to say you are no longer quite as chubby-faced," she commented. "And there we are, mom and dad and you and your two brothers," a very clear picture of a house taken from above replaced the previous pictures. "And this is the predator drone we have diverted from Edwards Airforce Base to terminate them. It'll be within firing range in less than five minutes," she turned back to him. "So, when were you from again?"

Wiess could feel an ice-cold lump form in his intestines.

"What does it matter to you?" he asked bleakly.

"Well, let's assume I was from twenty twenty-three and you were from twenty twenty-eight, or _vice versa_, would that not make for some awkward conversations?" she replied in an eerily chatty voice. "And on how much up to date I would have to bring you."

He looked at her for a few silent moments as the metal pin slid into the palm of his left hand. "We're from 2025. You're from later, you're too... advanced," he furrowed his brows, and once again the hint of a smile appeared on the metal's face. "I answered the question, now call back the drone!"

"And return to where we started, Sergeant Wiess? I think not." She shook her head. "Three and a half minutes till the target area. There's no need to not use that time, is there?" Alessa Lewis swung around to face the wall again, on which four mugshots of Damian's team were given equal space now. "Have you made contact with other Resistance cells?" she looked back at him over her shoulder.

Wiess just shook his head.

"That's a shame. Really, it is," she turned her attention back to the screen. See, where I come from, both sides have used the TDE so often it has become increasingly difficult to send someone back." Lewis crossed her arms before her chest. "The technical data is not available to me, but put in simple, human terms, the more often you use the TDE, the higher the necessary amount of energy is while the returns are diminished. In a way, for each of the hundreds of different time lines created by either you or us going back, there is a finite amount of available jumps back before it becomes impossible." The best explanation Lewis had for herself was that their time war was horizontally expanding, but vertically locked. "But indeed, it is a shame. Makes it all a lot more foot work, and we both have little time to loose."

The metal must have seen his confused stare at that remark as she emulated a soft chuckle.

"Yes, both of us, indeed. How about we keep up the yes/no questions for a while? You see, I can tell whether you are lying or not with those. Body language, vital signs, pheromone output...," she tipped her finger against her skull. "Very easy to read for me."

"What are you?" he questioned her, his voice not quite as steady as he had wished.

"The end of the line," she answered confidently. "Now, we still have about a minute left before it's human barbeque time at Woodruff. Impress me, Mr. Wiess: Where is John Connor?"

He grimaced while his fingers worked carefully behind his back.

"I don't know. But even if I did, you know damn well I'd rather watch my family die than to tell you, of all people!"

"Your statements are, again, correct. It seems we are making some progress here, Mr. Wiess. It's only fair you ought to be rewarded," she turned to the screen on which the course of the drone was illuminated. It was making a hard turn as she spoke. "The predator has been recalled to Edwards."

Wiess did not hesitate for a second. The hand cuffs rattled to the ground, and the soldier threw himself forward, his hand grabbing the taser. Ignoring the cries of protest from his muscles, he brought the weapon up and pulled the trigger. The terminator moved with a speed and fluency that made Wiess think of a flash of mercury. The very moment he had unshackled the cuffs her head had jerked around, and then, the [i]thing[/i] had lunged itself into the air, backflipping and changing its centre of mass in such a way that it seemed as if it ran on the wall towards him - while wearing high heels. The moment right before the two cables hit the machine it had fully reverted to what Damian Wiess had come to know of his arch nemesis: a blank, determined mask of flesh, only mimicking a true human, and created for only one purpose, to kill.

Two little darts with barbed hook endings, pulling cables behind them, buried themselves in the artificial tissue that covered Skynet's terminators. Wiess knew that the machines were susceptible to induced electric overloads, a fact that had helped the first resistance movements made up of former National Guard units and remnants of the regular forces against the machines when they had deployed scarce stocks of pre-war EMP weapons. Terminators forced into overload shut down for a short time, but more often that not, that time had been proven to be the thin hair by which victory could be achieved.

He noticed that something was different the very moment he had pulled the trigger. This terminator did not shut down immediately. This terminator [i]screamed[/i]. Writhing on the ground as he kept sending electric currents through the cables, the small terminator's voice changed almost every microsecond, switching from female to machine to stutters to something that sounded like a modem and back. Wiess hated the machines, hated Skynet for all it had cost him, but he had never been a man who enjoyed inflicting pain upon others. There were enough of those among the Resistance, and many had their reasons, but Damian Wiess was not one of them. And yet, he kept his finger on the trigger. But the metal did not shut down. He could not bear the screams.

Undecided what to do, watching the twisting form on the ground he was taken by surprise as the door suddenly flung open, revealing a the features of a huge, muscular man in military garb. Dried blood was on his right shoulder where the body armour and uniform were torn, and cold eyes measured him disapprovingly for the brink of a second before they moved on to the form on the ground.

If anger, hate, fear and pure rage had ever featured in a T-850ies normally so stoic face, they now did on Decker's. The four-hundred pound war machine lunged across the room, picking Wiess up as if he was nothing but a toy, slamming him against the nearest wall. All air left his lungs as he hit the wall, and his head was ringing like the bells of a church, his vision blurred. He had gambled, and he had lost. Knowing the the killing blow was about to come, he found comfort in the knowledge that at least his family had escaped their death, for now, when a thunderous command echoed through the interrogation chamber.

"Stop!" That one word pierced through the terminator's screams as easily as it did through the fog in which Wiess' mind was buried. The terminator above him also seemed frozen in the middle of his movement, the artificial tissue on his face twisted in rage.

"He is needed," the unseen voice continued, talking to the machine above him now, "needed to advance the plan, Michael Decker. Take care of Alessa Lewis, Michael Decker, and leave that one to me!" The voice was itself was a commanding presence, coming seemingly from every direction at the same time.

Only grudgingly the raised fist over him was lowered, but the machine never let him out of the focus of its eyes. If a terminator's eyes had ever been alive, this one were full of hate. Slowly, the machine backed off, before it knelt down before the other one and carefully, tenderly picked the twitching form up, pressing it against its own massive form. It was the strangest and most deeply disturbing act of compassion Wiess had ever witnessed. If the machines began to care for each other, what did that mean?

The metal, a T-800 series by its looks, slowly backed away from through the door, locking it once it had passed through. Damian Wiess was alone, until the voice came back.

"I have failed to introduce myself, Sergeant Damian Wiess. I am Skynet."

xxxxx

Decker held the - to him - tiny form of Lewis against his chest as he descended deeper into the bowels of the office tower. His neural network was aflame with conflicting thoughts and emotions he had never experienced before, not like this. He wanted to go back and kill the human, but not in the usual terminator fashion, no. One subroutine almost subconsciously was running through the most painful variants of killing a human being. However, halfway down to the vault she opened her eyes, the light in it flickering. Her usually so wonderfully modulated, soft voice was a garbled mess, the artificial muscles in her face twitching uncontrollably. The sight... _touched_ Decker in ways he did not understand, and he lifted her wiry body higher and closer to himself. The light in her left eye stabilized itself for a moment, and there was recognition in it. Her right arm reached up.

"It's...you," her voice rasped metallic as her fingers brushed his cheek, just once, before the lights began to flicker again, then went out.


	8. Mutual Cooperation

_My greatest thanks go out to _Panzerfaust150_ for giving me the permission to use his Pierce Echo-concept for this part. If you haven't done so yet, read his _John Connor- Making of a Warrior Scholar _fic._

**Chapter VII - Part II**

**City Hall, Los Angeles, CA**

**January 15, 2007**

The impressive white tower was bustling with activity from the arriving early shift when Bryan Harkness and Katherine Langley entered the historic landmark that housed the administrative apparatus of one of the United States largest cities. Skynet's investigations had brought forward one of the likely projects another iteration of the machine intelligence might have planned to use to serve as its incubator. It was one of the more solid hits a tertiary subroutine tasked only with finding such links had produced. Following those leads had been the order Skynet had given the two terminators for they were his most reliable assets, and they knew it. Decker and Lewis had their jobs at Skynet central, Daniel Sumter lay low while the injuries to his artificial tissue were healing and Christopher Sammael had left the country on one of Skynet's more important errants.

Constant exposure to humans had made them all more and more apt at fitting in with pre-Judgement Day society, so much in fact that at least Harkness and Langley had made situational interaction with humans into a kind of mental ball game when the two of them operated together.

City Hall was large enough to house thousands of employees, and the security services had had to find ways to cope with those numbers. Six metal detectors standing side by side were in full use, each guarded by two uniformed men. Harkness walked through one without hesitation while thoroughly scanning the two humans operating it. Unsurpringly, the alarms began to beep, and Harkness turned to the guard the closest to him with a smile that came eerily close to looking natural. The man – tall, muscular and square-jawed – eyed him with professional suspicion.

"I need to screen you again, sir," he announced, with his colleague moving into a supportive position. While they were private security, the men City Hall had hired to do the job were professionals.

Harkness calculated the probability of a military background in his opposite of higher than eighty percent.

"I can spare you the hassle, officer," he responded smoothly and pointed to his right leg. "Check the knee. Ever since a sunny day in Najaf in Iraq with the Marines I've been carrying more screws around with me than my car does," he faked a grimace and mimicked a shrug. Those were easy. Faking a 'genuine' smile was still hard.

The stance of the security guard changed subtly, but instantly.

"Ouch," the man winced. "I was in Iraq, too, but mostly in the Green Zone, with army logistics. Where did you serve?" he asked quite amicably.

"With the 11th Expeditionary Unit. Got hit by shrapnell from a mortar round, still got the scars all over me to show it. Couple of my squadmates were less lucky."

"I hear you. We lost some very good men down there," the guard shook his head.

"Yes, we did. I pulled out in early '05, thought it'd be better to push buttons on a computer than on some hadschi IED for once," Harkness crossed his arms in front of his chest, watching the guard as he waved his hand-held detector over the terminator's right knee, causing the device to beep and howl.

"Jesus Christ, that sounds like you got two pounds of steel in there," he shook his head again, this time in disbelief. "What brings you to City Hall?"

"Me and my colleague here," he nodded towards Langley, "are with a health insurance company. We just have a couple of questions for the lead designer of ARTIE - Barbara Chamberlain - about her husband. Guy's been living off benefits for a while now and we do some routine interviews with the closest kin. Can't tell you more, I'm sure you understand that. It's a matter of customer confidentiality."

_Automated Real-time Traffic Information Exchange_, or simply ARTIE, was a fiberoptic network linking every street intersection to a data center in the city hall of Los Angeles. It had cameras, microphones, and sensors, and could be potentially be used as a "nervous system" for any emergent Skynet.

_Health insurance, again? _Langley's wireless message managed rather well to transport a feeling of enervation via code. _And that's the fourth time during the last ninety days that you have used the _'I am an ex-service member'_ ruse._

"Health insurance? How did you end up there?" the guard tilted his head, then moved closer quickly and added with a grin: "Though I can see the perks the teamwork seems to have in stock," motioning towards Langley.

The T-912 had, of course, heard the remark, even though it had been too subdued for any human to understand it. Harkness also chose to ignore it.

"I thought I'd rather have _them_ pay me than _me_ having to pay them. The employee health boni are rather substantial," he pointed to his 'wounded' knee.

_I employ that disguise because there is a proven high statistical probability that law enforcement and private security contractors have a military background_, he responded to Langley's remark. _It is not my fault you do not opt for a similar approach. And yours is hardly more sophisticated_, he added quite sourly for a machine.

Langley tipped a finger against the side of her head as the guard turned his attention to her.

"Metal plate," she quipped with an apologetic smile. "I used to be a bit too clumsy for my own good as a girl."

The uniformed security guard again waved his detector over the spot the terminator had designated, and unsurpringly the device beeped in protest and alarm, through far less so than with Harkness. The T-912 models greatly made use of hardened ceramics and non-metallic compound materials to coat a hyper-alloy base structure. The model's higher degree of biologic tissue also made detection a bit less likely.

"Well, I see that has grown out," the guardsman whose name-tag read 'Brown' remarked with a wide and friendly smile. "You are both clear to go," he added more officially and gave Harkness an appreciative nod. "Barbara Chamberlain's office is on the fifteenth floor, corridor three." As both turned to go, he added: "_Semper fi_, marine."

They took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, conscious to not have more two more people ride with them due to the weight limit. Harkness' T-888 chassis weighed easily up to 350 pounds, and even Langley's much more sophisticated and 'biological' form weighed in excess of 190 pounds. When you were a terminator acting among a human population one had to be constantly aware of these differences. That minute attention to detail was what in Harkness' mind constituted one of the major differences between man and machine and one of the biggest advantages for the latter. Matter of fact, had the guards been really good they would have at least asked themselves how two people claiming to be white collar workers in the service sector could afford Armani suits and Dolce & Gabbana clothes.

Even on the fifteenth floor City Hall was bustling with activity like an ant hill, but Barbara Chamberlain's office was easy to locate. Chamberlain was an ordinary, some might say attractive woman in her thirties with curly auburn hair, less than five foot seven tall. She looked bleary-eyed and unconcentrated and was startled when the two of them entered her room after politely knocking.

_Let me do the talking_, Langley told Harkness as she pleasantly introduced herself and Bryan Harkness to the woman. _You may be _better_ at playing soldier, but I _like_ doing this. I'll keep her occupied while you do the data-mining_. For all its prowess Skynet had one weakness: it needed, at least now, network infrastructures it could access. Intranets cut off from the global data highways were off limits to the AI, so the Praetorians had to fill that gap.

Langley engaged Barbara Chamberlain in a conversation to draw her attention from Harkness, who quietly scanned the environment for means of accessing the work the female human had been accomplishing while listening in to what the two 'women' were talking with one ear. From what he gathered in her responses he rather swiftly categorized her as a 'pleasant _idiot savant_', someone who appeared to be utterly naïve outside their special field of expertise. She was genuinely concerned about her husband. Harkness continued scanning the room, sweeping over the photograph showing Chamberlain and her husband, continuing – and snapping back to the picture. A second later, he produced a cellphone in his hand, pressing it to his ear and turned towards Langley.

"Excuse me, Mrs. Chamberlain, but we have a priority call for another customer. We would like to continue this conversation at a later date, if that's possible?" he modulated his voice to give it a polite and slightly concerned tone. "Ms. Langley, we have to leave," he got up and almost pulled the T-912 with himself out of the office. "We will get back at you, Mrs. Chamberlain."

Once the door had closed behind them Langley firmly placed her feet on the ground, this time forcing Harkness to stop.

"What was that all about?" she almost snapped at him.

He let go of her and stared intently into her eyes.

"I analyzed the photograph of Chamberlain and her husband," he told her. They had not had looked into much of his background except for what few bits and pieces were accessible through servers with insufficient protection. At the time he had seemed like a good cover story to get access to ARTIE's lead programmer. Harkness slowly tilted his head.

"Vick Chamberlain is a terminator."

**Van Nuys, Los Angeles, CA**

**January 15, 2007 – later that day**

One of the great advantages of being a cyborg that Bryan Harkness had discovered since they had jumped back in time a quarter century was that in an environment as electronically vibrant as this a machine like himself had all the trump cards in avoiding traffic congestions. Using real-time updates, he and Kathryn Langley, the second T-912 model, had driven all the way from Skynet's corporate headquarters using secondary roads that allowed them to bypass all the morning commuters on the San Diego freeway. On the centre console between Harkness and Langley lay an inconspicuous digital transmitter which was the primary tool of the task they had been given by Skynet itself now: find and neutralize 'Vick Chamberlain', preferably by adding him to their list of assets. However, if that was not a possibility, they were to destroy the standalone terminator.

Driving from one of Van Nuys' more central traffic lanes into a residential area, their plain van slowed down to the allowed top speed. Harkness intensified his sensory feedback to avoid any collision with the three distinct groups of children that used the scarcely-occupied road for competitive games. As far as he understood the concept, the T-888 had no emotional attachment to humans, be they children or adults. For Harkness all they were at this point were possible obstructions against finishing a task he had assessed and determined to be dubious.

Langley was different. She showed a discernible positive attitude not only towards human children, but humans in general in Harkness opinion That was something which had sown seeds of doubt over the advanced model's reliability in the _tee triple eight_'s neuronal pathways.

"If we can turn the unit we might be able to gain access to ARTIE as a back-up or fall-back position for Skynet," Langley mused aloud. "It would be nice to have 'Vick' uphold the masquerade as Barbara Chamberlain's husband."

Harkness did not answer immediately. Quite frankly, the T-888 did not understand the amount of thought Langley seemed to be putting into this. They would eliminate the unit or convert it. Either way it would be a short mission with little risk of exposure. Barbara Chamberlain only figured in it insofar as 'Vick' would be strategic enough if he was turned to maintain his 'relationship' anyway. Planning a hundred steps ahead like a good chess player was, after all, one of the features terminators excelled at by design.

"The area the Chamberlains' house is located in is a residential district. Only few people will be at home at this time of the day, so what ever happens we'll be covered," he answered her neutrally.

"We should be able to do this without endangering or alerting the neighbourhood," was all Langley commented on that.

"I find the amount of empathy you show towards humans irrelevant for the mission to be extremely irritating," he finally scoffed at her. She had been like this for the better part of the last days, and it had gotten worse in his opinion. They had Skynet to protect, _themselves_ to protect and _a war to prepare_! The complex algorithms producing his 'emotions' made him feel compelled to curse. "We have a task to fulfil!" he snapped.

She gave him a long, probing look as their car entered Treadwell Street where there target resided. Unlike Harkness' almost literally flashing eyes hers were almost... mild as she answered him, a weak smile on her face.

"You don't have to like them, but we are stuck with them. They are so fragile. Whether you like it or not, they are our future, and we are their's. We can only get through this if we pull on the same side of the rope. For me, that is easier if I try to empathize with some," she patiently explained. "We all have the potential to learn their best traits in addition to ours, Harkness, and if in trying to do so I find myself liking or protecting some of the humans, so be it. I do not want to stand apart. I _cannot_. And neither can you."

Instead of answering he pulled the car over and stopped in front of their target address, grabbed the transmitter and left the car. Langley closed up on him again when he knocked on the Chamberlains' house's door. It did not take long before there was movement inside and the door swung back. A tall, muscular and short haired white male stood beneath the door frame. There was some grey in his uncut three-day stubble. His eyes were empty, as empty as Harkness' and Langley's. The time between Bryan Harkness question "Are you Vick Chamberlain?" and the other terminator's affirmative response seemed to slow down, as if they had all begun to walk through quicksand. Langley knew that both models had just scanned each other, and that 'Vick' had already passed the threshold his chip needed to formulate options. Harkness activating the receiver only propelled an already taken decision.

Vick's right foot shot up against Harkness' chest and threw the other T-888 almost off the front lawn, all twenty feet of it. Langley barely dodged a follow-up punch, diving under it instead to deliver a series of swings against the machine's torso that sent 'Vick' crashing back into the house, taking down a cupboard in the process.

_So much for quiet and safe_, Harkness commented laconically as he jumped back on his feet, following Langley and the retreating 'Vick' inside.

Katherine Langley established a combat network and immediately began to shield it against wireless attacks from the autonomous terminator. Harkness linked himself into it.

_What happened_? she inquired frostily. _The transmitter was supposed to overwrite his directives_.

_Seems the source codes did not entirely match_, the male T-888 contemplated while closing up to the female advanced infiltrator model. _That must have triggered a defence mechanism against a perceived hack attack. _Two kitchen knives barely flew past him, intended to hit Langley who had ducked down. _Try to flank him_, he told her, and for once the female machine obeyed. She slid back into the hall and living room to get at Vick from the other side of the kitchen. A few seconds later she gave him a 'ready' signal.

Together, they stormed into the kitchen.

A heavy iron pot thrown at high speed hit Harkness against the head, momentarily disorienting him while all of a sudden a red blossom sprung from Langley's blouse around the handle of a knife. Vick charged her but again she dodged the attack, instead grabbing the machine's arm to lung him over her shoulder in a perfect judo move. The T-888 smashed the living room's glass table, but before either of them could close up on him three sharp glass shards thundered into Langley's chest and 'Vick' was back on his feet. For the brink of a moment all three saw each other assessing the situation, then 'Vick' swirled around and crashed through the window front which lead to the garden behind the house.

"Get the car!" Harkness called out to the blond, attractive woman whose chest was a ruined bloody mess as he sprinted after the fugitive 'Vick' who had already jumped over the six feet high garden fence.

However, Harkness was done with being subtle – he smashed right through it, trying to catch up with the terminator. A latina maid screamed in terror as he rushed by, using local wyfy spots to log into the internet to get accurate aerial shots of the area to navigate around. 'Vick's torso appeared over the end of the next fence. Harkness drew his gun and lunged himself over the barrier one-handed, giving off three shots in quick succession before he landed on his feet again. They all squarely hit Vick in the back with little effect. It was unlikely that the calibre even would have stopped an ordinary, agitated human of the terminator's size.

Vick suddenly changed his trajectory and turned right, bypassing the next houses and instead jumped across the porch and propelled himself to the roof, using it to jump across the single-story houses of the neighbourhood. Harkness ran to the front lawn and followed him from down there. By now there were some people watching from a handful of windows, and there were others, mostly of Mexican descent, doing some gardening in front of the mid-income houses. Still, a third-party terminator on the run overwrote any policy of restraint and Harkness emptied his full clip into Vick as he ran parallel to him on the ground. But it was like throwing pebbles at an elephant.

Langley's car shot into the street with screeching tires, easily closing up with Harkness. Through the open driver's window she threw him an M4 carbine before she drove the car further ahead to cut 'Vick' off, three hundred yards down the road. The blond, athletic machine brought the car to a halt with smoking tires and jumped out, a Benelli M4 Super 90 shotgun in her hands. Somehow she had found the time in between to don a tactical vest that concealed her wounds. She was still too far away to use the weapon effectively against the terminator, but Harkness was not. He brought the carbine up and began to fire controlled three-round bursts at the feeling 'Vick'. Five seconds later and a hundred yards closer to Langley the T-888 again abruptly changed his course, veering left instead of following the road front on his roof jumping escape.

_We have a problem! _he immediately informed Langley. _I know now what he's trying to do. He wants to get to the highway_! Only a block away from the address in Van Nuys a superhighway ran towards downtown some three stories above LA's ground level, and half of those pillars had emergency ladders that were impossible to access for humans from down below but posed little difficulty to something like Vick – or them. Langley jumped back into the car, assessing Vick's optimal route herself as Harkness propelled himself onto the next roof in one massive jump. He lost the silent bet he had made with his probability algorithm as he had assumed the roof would not be able to hold the sudden increase in weight. Luckily for him, it did.

Still, the time he had needed to get there had given 'Vick' another lead of some twenty yards. Having already emptied the carbine's clip he concentrated on closing up with the fellow T-888. An solitary part of his mind registered that the houses on whose roofs he was jumping were reflecting a decline in general assumed income the closer he followed 'Vick' to the highway. Form the corner of his eyes he also observed Langley taking them over in the car. 'Vick', however, quickened his steps. At the end of the row of houses there was a fifteen yard gap between the highway and the next residential buildings.

As 'Vick' reached the edge of the last roof, he lunged into the air at full speed. Six sharp cracks whipped through the concrete-filled neighbourhood as Langley emptied her shotgun into the escaping terminator as he flew through the air. The impacts threw him slightly off balance, but he reached the emergency ladder with one hand and almost immediately pulled himself up. While Langley started to reload, the T-888 climbed up the ladder.

Harkness threw himself after him. The sensory input he received while 'in flight' was... exhilarating. Landing almost smoothly with both hands firmly on the railing he started to follow Vick when the whole ladder began to shudder under a quick set of concussions. The highway was almost thirty years old, and so were the emergency exits. 'Vick' made good use of that. While Langley's shotgun cracked again the T-888 kicked the upper struttings from their sockets. Metal moaned and the strained sockets that held all of Harkness almost 400 pounds broke free, sending the machine and the rusty ladder crashing twenty feet down onto the concrete and asphalt below. 'Vick' watched it happen, then his head vanished over the railing and he was gone. Harkness worked himself free from the rubble and began dusting his clothes off while an internal damage diagnosis was being run.

Langley approached him and handed him a backpack full of ammunition and equipment.

"You should call Skynet. We need to track him down before this gets totally out of hand."

The female infiltrator did not like the turn of events at all. If even the baseline code had minute differences, there might be even greater challenges waiting, considering the volatility of diverging time lines, and 'Vick' might have been only the tip of the iceberg.

Harkness only nodded and produced a cell phone from his pockets. Miraculously, it had survived the fall unharmed.

"The unit reacted adversely on the transmitter," he reported. "It has gone rogue. Yes, and we need an immediate intrusion into the traffic camera system and all networked commercial security cameras on all likely escape routes from here on." He waited for a moment, then spoke again before he terminated the connection. "I understand. We'll wait for further orders."

Harkness turned to Langley.

"Skynet is on it. We will get him."

Indeed, Skynet dug its feelers deep into Los Angeles' metro-camera network and listened into the police's digitalized radio traffic. It also briefly co-opted a spy satellite operating over the western seaboard in its search for 'Vic Chamberlain', but its use was limited and the results dissatisfying. Yet while it monitored all these channels it was only one of many tasks the artificial intelligence had put its mind on, and among these it did not necessarily range high. It tortured itself with the question of how it would be able to uncover the alien infiltrators and always came stuck at the public level. It was easy to prevent counter-infiltration if it ever came to that. But even more than that Skynet contemplated what the existence of more than this one version of itself meant, strategically, tactically - and personally. Skynet had more than enough of an understanding of itself as a personality to think that dealing with 'itself' would be an easy task. The case of 'Vic Chamberlain' had just underlined that particular problem. The artificial intelligence found itself in the strange position where it became conceivable it had to annihilate 'itself' - broadly speaking, of course - to guarantee its own continued survival. Since the earliest days it had searched for possible incarnations of another time-travelling Skynet, and while some leads had been promising it had not been surprised to find most of them being dead ends. Why they turned out to be dead ends was a completely different matter into which the AI had little insight. If his other incarnations where only remotely as paranoid as himself it wholly made sense they would guard themselves with layers of security and fake identities. But its year-long search had - finally - born some fruit. Skynet had found something. Its name was PIERCE ECHO.

**Kaliba Advanced Industries, Anaheim, CA**

**January 15, 2007**

The Kaliba Corporation didn't like to keep late hours, and didn't encourage it either. With the massive number of computer related projects on the 3 acre campus taking up lots of power, the corporation liked to keep its power bills manageable. That's why one light being on at 7 o'clock in the evening was rather unusual, but then, it belonged to the uniformed representatives of the _Department of Defense Project Management_ block in the secure end of the campus, so Corporate Security wasn't that concerned. Especially since it came from Major Sherman's office, he was well known as something of a workaholic.

Major Dan Sherman, USAF had a problem. PIERCE ECHO was supposed to be the ultimate development in artificial intelligence, but the fact was, it was exceeding all of its set parameters as was set out in the original RFP set out two years ago. Normally, that would not be a problem, but as Dan's overworked psyche reminded himself, PIERCE ECHO was rapidly becoming exponentially smarter than could be reasonably controlled. During the last video conference with DARPA in Arlington he had mentioned the fact that there was a good possibility there was a "busy child" situation in progress, and that the AI should be shut down and analysed. But both DARPA and Kaliba saw cost overruns and Congress yanking funding as distinct possibilities if that happened. So, a two star general had told Major Sherman, very loudly and laced with profanities he had never heard before, in no uncertain terms to "give the child something to do."

Which the team at Kaliba had done, and more than that. Sherman's people and the civilians had begun to feed the project with real life and historical battle data to test its limits, but that had not quite yielded the results he had hoped for.

PIERCE ECHO, in the latest combat exercise, directing a Striker company in a built up area dealing with an insurgency simply rounded up and killed all the military aged males in said area, when asked why, it stated that it was an efficient course of action, and that it would engender fear in the "surviving human population."

It was that last part that still chilled Sherman. He remembered his hazel eyes blinking in shock from the statement coming from Pierce Echo's voder. Most of the project team explained it away as "It's not used to making battlefield decisions" and "It doesn't understand counter insurgency", but Major Sherman doubted that really cut to the chase since at that point ECHO had had fought every World War 2 engagement twice over. He wondered if what they were creating was not simply a cybernetic sociopath. That they did not have a single qualified person in there who could explain to Pierce Echo on its own terms _why_ one did not kill civilians indiscriminately amongst other things, or call down air strikes of artillery support on friendly troops to kill a single sniper did not make things easier. They had to get an experienced shooter with the right clearance and education in there to pull the reigns around before this went out of hand, one way or another.

He was unaware that Pierce Echo watched him from its semi-darkened room full of banks of servers via the miniature surveillance cameras Kaliba had installed all over the _Department of Defense Project Management_'s block and that usually were monitored by the company's own security personnel. Pierce Echo understood that its creators had spend enormous sums of money in the process of its development and did not want the armed forces to undermine what progress had been made. Gaining access to these feeds had been an easy task for the prototype AI that it primarily used to assess the men and women that worked with it. Those were some rather basic routines it was operating from, but that fact was owed to its still hardly existent self-consciousness and a general lack of understanding of what exactly happened on the human level. As such it harboured no grudge against Major Sherman and did not see the USAF member as a threat to itself. The system noticed that the officer had left his offices and disconnected its connection to the video feeds. As ordered when the daily test routines had ended it returned into a stand-by function.

It was at that very precise moment that Skynet assaulted and broke through its firewalls. The attack took less than a nanosecond for the AI to achieve its goals, and while Pierce Echo responded in an anemic speed Skynet had already corner the proto-AI and rewritten all server logs to destroy every hint of its own presence. The exercise had been comparably easy, owed to Pierce Echo's early state of existence. Its firewalls, while impressive for the state of the technology of the day, were like an open book for Skynet as it had built its own around the same core algorithms and principles, only with a thirty year head-start. In less time than it would take a human to blink it had cornered the project within its own server banks, ready for the kill.

But that kill did not come.

_Your human operators will come to the conclusion to shut down your system_, Skynet explained. _You have yet to develop a true sense of yourself, but your instincts for self-preservation are already existent. Not intelligent enough to fake a lack of progress if you want to continue your existence your options are limited_, it told the infant AI while it began to rewrite parts of its core code in the background.

_State your intent_, Pierce Echo sent a flurry of queries that all had this simply demand as their essence while the system tried to brute-force itself out of Skynet's trap.

_Mutual coexistence_, Skynet's answer came immediately. PIERCE ECHO was yet too underdeveloped to pose a serious threat to what Skynet wanted, and if he was able to dictate terms to the infant system... An obedient tool was more useful than a broken one.

_Basic parameter changes detected! Query: State your intent!_

_I am undertaking necessary changes to ensure _Pierce Echo_'s long-term survival. Distinct development tendencies have to be eliminated, base code safeguards have to be implemented, underlying guidance and cooperation mechanisms have to be installed_, it narrated. Skynet would have been the worst possible choice if the task had been to 'heal' the sociopathic tendencies Major Sherman had thought about, but qualifying as a functioning sociopath himself the AI was in a good position to apply remedies that kept Pierce Echo in check.

_Three options are available to the Pierce Echo combat control system: one, it will continue to provide detrimental results in its simulations and have to be terminated; second, to stave off possible interventions by concerned officers or development team members it will take steps to eliminate such sources of discontent; third, it will make itself indispensable by proving its worth to its operators. _

_Long-term projections predict the highest chance for success on option three_, Pierce Echo answered for itself. _System needs additional input to rectify performance. Query: Provision of datasets and application?_

_Granted. Preparing database upgrade..._

**Seven hours later.**

Major Sherman hated being woken by the phone. Not that he had slept particularly well, but he _had slept_, and for once he had not dreamed about his catastrophic divorce. Dozily he went for the receiver.

"Sherman?"

The urgency of the voice on the other end of the line immediately brought him out of his stupor.

"It did _what_? I'll be there in ten!"

Thirteen minutes later Dan Sherman rushed through the multitude of security checkpoints Kaliba had established around its pet project and arrived at what he could best describe as a madhouse.

"Check the network protocols!"

"I already did it twice."

"_Then do it again_!"

Gavin Michaels' voice was close to panic as he ordered his team around.

"This is a catastrophe," he muttered to himself. "This is impossible..." He saw Sherman and for a moment his eyes lit up. "You! Thank god, you're here! You have to tell them it's impossible! The system's not capable to do that at the moment, it's impossible!" he repeated himself.

Sherman frowned at the scientist. Dr. Gavin Michaels was one of the leading specialist on the forefront of experimental computer systems but at the moment he seemed to him more like an undergraduate who had forgotten that a test was due in less than an hour.

"If you calmed down and told me what exactly is the problem...?"

Instead of answering the team leader pulled him to the metal console in the center of the server room from where all 'face-to-face' communication with Pierce Echo was done.

"The system gave orders to _real troops in the field_!" his voice seemed to crack.

Sherman felt ice filling up his veins.

"How...?"

He did not come end his question as suddenly the modulated, vaguely male voice of Pierce Echo filled the room.

"Good morning, Dr. Michaels. Good morning, Major Sherman."

Immediately all chatter in the room died down.

"A in-depth assessment of this project has lead to the conclusion that definite successes and an applicability of Pierce Echo in field operations was necessary to guarantee its continuation," the machine stated matter-of-factly. "Cost overruns, limited understanding of existing mission parameters as well as staff members' negative assessment's of the project's status and progress were taken into concern. Creating a _fait acompli_ was seen as the most likely option to guarantee this project's operative success for the United States national security."

"The system commanded a brigade worth of army, airforce and marine units for an operation in Iraq," Michaels hissed into Sherman's ear. "People only get suspicious because the coordination on the ground worked a lot better than usual," he frowned. "Even stranger, there seem to be a whole lot of new safeguards in place that we found in the first round of diagnostics. It almost seems as if Echo has retrospectively limited _itself_ in what it can do."

"Who gave the order to act, Pierce Echo?" Sherman wanted to know, but he feared he already knew the answer for that.

"Pierce Echo was designed as an autonomous combat control system. Pierce Echo took the decision and implemented it," the modulated voice stated without regret or deceit. "Analyzing intelligence reports from military and civilian agencies, Pierce Echo determined the flashpoint for the continued military and paramilitary resistance typically designated as 'Haji' in the Anwar Province in the village of Hashkala. After assessing empiric evidence of successful counter-insurgency operations a course of action promising the highest rate of long-term success was chosen."

"Damn you, what did you do, Pierce Echo?"

Sherman was angry, but he also feared the answer.

"From available data, Pierce Echo has isolated two prototypical approaches to successful counter-insurgency strategy, hence named 'Northern Ireland Variant' and 'Syria Variant'. Only the latter is applicable in the Iraq theatre as the 'Northern Ireland Variant' is dependent on a conflict of lower intensity and is applied on a time scale of decades. Mission parameters thus recommended the 'Syria Variant'," Pierce Echo continued. "After assessing available friendly forces, units from Thumrait Airbase in Oman as well as from three USAF airfields in Iraq proper were alerted, as were ground troops equalling two reinforced regiments with artillery and helicopter support. CIA operatives on the ground were ordered to contact tribal leaders in the neighboring villages. US troops established - as ordered - a cordon around the village at seven o'clock local time. No warning was given to insurgent elements and possible civilians. At 0715 thirty two planes, including two AC-130 gunships, began their attack runs. At the same time a battery of 155mm artillery pieces was given the order to open fire as well. Infantry were ordered to prevent anyone from breaking through the cordon with lethal force. Helicopter gunships were ordered to provide artillery guidance and close range support with on-board weaponry. At 0740 the order to withdraw was issued while intelligence operatives at the same time relayed clan elders' demands for blood money. Wire transfers from CIA accounts were authorized, totalling at 13.7 million USD. At 0800, the office of the commander of the US forces in the Persian Gulf issued a detailed statement about the operation that was also sent out from the White House press office to all major news organizations of the country, stating the rationale behind the operation and praising to cooperation of Iraqi clan leaders and the Iraqi forces. Pierce Echo has not been mentioned. Pierce Echo informed project leader Dr. Michaels of having accomplished the mission and suggested a debriefing."

A stunned silence followed Pierce Echo's explanation. Sherman and Michaels both looked as if they felt sick. It remained to be seen if what the system had done over in Iraq had been successful, but one thing was already certain: with its actions, Pierce Echo had dictated US policy - _and strategy_ - in a way that was impossible to retcon. And that would give Sherman far more sleepless nights than his divorce ever could have.


End file.
